Announcing Perch 1.2

Today we’re very pleased to launch Perch 1.2, a significant update to our really little content management system. As well as the usual handful of fixes to address problems that have been reported through the support system, we’ve added a number of new features that customers have been asking for.

One thing I know a lot of people have been waiting for is the ability to sort items in multiple-item regions. Perch 1.2 adds a new options screen for regions, enabling you to pick a field to sort by (such as title or date) and the direction to sort in. If you don’t want to sort based on content you already have, we’ve created ways for you to add new fields which are used in editing but aren’t output into your page. You can limit the number of items displayed here too.

Another place these edit-only fields can be used is with our new and improved conditional tags. The perch:if tags can now be nested within each other, and we’ve also added the option to use a perch:else with it too. Check out the docs for the full low-down.

We’ve improved templates in a number of other ways too, including checkbox fields, the ability to add a time to date fields.

Remember that region options screen? We’ve also added the ability to toggle a region between being single- or multiple-item without the need to redefine it. You can also hide a region from Editors, which is useful if you’ve got chunks of HTML in shared regions that you don’t want the client to be distracted by.

For power users (you know who you are) we’ve added a perch_content_custom() function to enable you to reuse content within a page and across multiple pages. This enables you to do things like put your latest news item on your home page, or to create archive pages based on longer listings.

For the full details, check out the update page, and you can download the latest version — which is completely free to existing customers — from your account.