Blog

Perch will be three years old on May 31st. That’s quite a milestone in the life of a really little CMS and we thought we’d like to make a little video to mark the occasion featuring some of our Perchers.

Much as we’d love to show up at all of your offices with a video camera that might be a bit tricky given that we have Perchers all over the world. So we’d like to invite you to contribute by sending us a little video.

One of the core concepts contained in the development of Perch was the desire to create structured content. At edgeofmyseat.com we had been building large-scale, custom systems with structured content at their core for several years. With Perch we wanted to bring that idea into a smaller scale, easily deployed CMS. We don’t believe that small sites should care about their content any less than a large site.

It’s time has come to think about the Blog app again. For those of you who use Blog, or have considered it and decided against, we’d like to hear from you.

Ever since its launch, our free Gallery app has been one of the most popular. As is so often the case, when an app gets a lot of use we begin to see how its flexibility and usefulness can be improved.

One of the great strengths of Perch is the flexibility to construct content forms that match the nature of your content. Often you know when a field like a textarea should expect a little or a lot of content.

The perch:before and perch:after tags enable you to wrap a region with mark-up that will only be displayed if the region has content.

This tips explains how to use the words and chars attributes to create excerpts.

Sometimes, when outputting a multiple item region, it’s useful to be able to number the items. This can be achieved with perch_item_index.

The perch:help tag gives you the ability to add instructional information, images and even video to any administration form in Perch.

The help attribute for template tags enables the developer to provide help next to individual form fields in the admin area.

The perch_item_first and perch_item_last special ID values can be used to identify the first and last items in a multiple-item template.

There are a few little gems in the Perch templating engine that are easy to miss in the documentation. One such gem is the special ID value perch_item_odd.

We’ve created a “cheat sheet” quick reference as a way to explore the template tags offered by Perch.

Our official add-ons are free for anyone with a Perch license. We strongly believe that you should know what developing your site will cost in license fees. If you have paid for Perch – you can download and install every single one of our add-ons if you like, with no additional cost.

In an interview for our Customer Stories series of posts, Ryan Singer of 37signals explains why he uses Perch.

Today we have made live the Perch 1.7 release which contains, in addition to a few bug fixes and tweaks, two huge new features – Perch Forms and search.

Yesterday we launched our new Perch Registered Developer Programme. This is open to any individual freelancer or company who develops sites using Perch. Our aim is to promote companies who use Perch and also to provide a listing for people who are looking for someone to build a site or Perch add-on. In this way we hope the network will be beneficial to the members but also to the entire community.

As the solution for using HTML5 with Perch shows, Perch can easily be used to manage content on an HTML5 site as you have complete control of your mark-up. For those of you working in HTML5 we’ve created a set of default templates for Perch which are a direct replacement for the existing templates (found in /perch/templates/content) and can simply be dropped in and used or edited.

If you’ve needed to ask for help, or visited the forums in the last couple of weeks you’ll be aware that we have moved over to a new, integrated system for support, forums and documentation. We hope that this will help to end confusion about where to post and make it easier for us to support you and for the community to help each other.

On the most recent project where you chose not to use Perch – what stopped you? What is Perch currently missing that would enable you to choose it for more projects?