Building your next Perch site on Perch Runway

Since our launch of Perch Runway last year many long-time Perch customers have moved to Perch Runway for their new site builds. If you know Perch there are surprisingly few differences when developing straightforward sites, and you can take advantage of the more advanced features in Perch Runway as you need them.

In this post I’ll introduce some of the differences, for Perchers who are thinking of trying out Runway for the first time.

No more .htaccess wrangling

The routing in Perch Runway means you don’t need to wrangle with rewrite rules to create nice URLs. When you first install your site you’ll need to add some rules to your .htaccess (or the equivalent for your server if using Nginx or IIS) after that, you configure all of your routing in the Perch Admin. Most people find this far easier than messing about with rewrite rules!

No more files created on disk

In Perch, if you create a new page you get a new file on disk. This works well for simple sites but does require that you have server permissions to create those files and – to fully backup your site – you need to download all the new pages created by content editors.

In Perch Runway page information is stored in the database, removing the headache of remembering to back those files up. You can take this a step further and use cloud storage and a CDN for any uploaded assets in Perch Runway. If you do that, then you can be in a position where the only thing from Perch you need to back up is the database file. Making it much easier to protect your data and also to develop locally and on staging – just import your MySQL backup and you are ready to go.

Master Pages take on an more central role

In Perch you use Master Pages to create a page template for any new pages that are created through the Perch Admin – as opposed to pages created by the web designer by hand when setting up the site. In Perch Runway with no “physical” pages on disk, all pages are created using Master Pages. However pretty much everything you know about Master Pages remains the same.

Collections of structured content

Often Perchers create a page with a region on it purely to collect data that can be used elsewhere on the site. It doesn’t really belong on a page. In Perch Runway we have the powerful Collections feature. It works very much like creating a Region and then displaying the data using perch_content_custom. However Collections are far more powerful and can be related to each other and reused far more flexibly. They are also versioned per item rather than by the whole region.

Your knowledge of creating templates and using perch_content_custom will all be useful when working with Collections – and if you are upgrading a site from Perch to Runway you can even import a Region into a Collection.

Try Perch Runway

Once you have made the jump to Perch Runway experience tells us you won’t look back. Most of the Perchers who have used Runway once have bought additional licenses since. If you just want to try it out we have a Developer license for personal sites, and we’ll be there to help in support with the small initial learning curve.