Everything has its time

It’s a shame when things come to an end. I’ve recently decided to move on from my position at Sage after five years and it has got me thinking about a lot of things, including how things have a natural arc.

I’ve been reviewing the Skills section of my website, which I had forgotten was there, and one of the pages was on a little content management system (CMS) called Perch.

Perch was brilliant. I read about it in Net Magazine back in 2010, when searching for a WordPress alternative (me and WordPress have never seen eye to eye!), and it made perfect sense to me:

• The editing experience was well designed and made perfect sense to my clients, who had little/no technicnical know-how
• It focused on structured content rather than a giant WYSIWYG textarea, so I could ensure editors wouldn’t accidentally break their website
• The markup in the templates was completely unopinionated; everything as I coded it and no extraneous <div>s
• The community was amazing, often propping up my limited PHP expertise

But all good things come to an end. Releases had been few and far between for a couple of years and Perch was sold in 2021. Within a year it was clear that the new owners were just looking to make what money they could out of existing customers with minimal investment.

So I started to move all of my clients onto a more open platform: Eleventy. For those that used their CMS functionality regularly, I plugged in Decap CMS. No database, no licenses or upgrades to purchase, but still the simplicity of editing and clean output.

I loved Perch while it was in active development, just as I’ve loved my time at Sage, but sometimes the time comes to move on. It can be sad, but the ‘what comes next’ is exciting!