News updates, tips on using Perch and running a great web design business
Looking for quick tips that will help you develop Perch sites more efficiently? News and updates about Perch, web design inspiration? You have found the right place! The Blog is curated by Drew and Rachel.
The next iteration of Perch is of course Perch 4. The changes reach from the back end technologies through to the front end user interface, and from the way you work with add-ons through to how Perch itself is licensed. Here’s a few hints of what to expect.
PHP 5 will no longer receive security updates after the end of 2018. If you run an old version and your host upgrades to a new version of PHP, you’ll not be able to log in until you update Perch.
Today marks nine years since the first public launch of Perch v1.0. In that time, Perch has matured from being a tiny content editor to a very small family of flexible content management tools.
We increasingly see customers looking for ways to rationalise more complex edit forms. As forms grow in complexity with more fields being added, it can sometimes be difficult for a CMS user to see what’s going on. Big forms feel complex and daunting, and complex and daunting forms don’t get used like they should.
One of the primary reasons Perch has its own template language is that we wanted templates that were both robust and easy to learn. We wanted a template language that had the same strengths as HTML, with a syntax that was easy to read and wouldn’t completely destroy your page if you made a small mistake. In fact, we wanted it to be so much like HTML, that we adopted HTML-like tags as the basis.
One of the great strengths of building a project on Perch is that as the site develops over time you have a natural upgrade path to Perch Runway. The presence of two different-yet-the-same products can sometimes raise the question of which you should be using and when. If building a new project, should you choose Perch or Perch Runway?
July’s release of the free Blog add-on for Perch and Perch Runway adds support for webmentions. One thing that quickly became apparent when displaying likes and reports on my own site was that the traditional listing format that we’re used to for comments is not well suited to these lighter interactions. One popular solution to this is a design pattern known as the facepile.
A common pattern with a paged listing such as a blog, is to do something different with the first item. We’ve added some new variables to help.
We provide extensive, free video tutorials to help you get started and master Perch.
We launched Perch on the 31st of May, 2009. In this post we look back at how little Perch grew up.