Perch 2 has landed

We first launched Perch in May 2009. In the three years since launch, the software has matured to become a great solution for managing small sites. We’ve listened to our Perchers and added new features based on your feedback.

As we added features it became obvious that many of you were managing much larger sites with Perch than we ever imagined. Perch served your content perfectly well but the admin interface, designed for very small sites, became difficult to use for larger ones. This is the issue at the heart of Perch 2 – still keeping Perch as a “really little CMS” yet giving your site room to grow.

The full list of features can be found on the update page however some of the core features in this update are as follows.

Integration of Pages App

The separate Pages add-on has now become part of Perch Core. This enables us to better create navigation and manage your site map. You can still switch this functionality off for editors if you prefer editors to only manage existing content rather than create new pages in the site. Have a look at our video about creating new pages in Perch 2.

Full Access Control

Perch originally had two levels of admin users – an admin with access to everything and editors with access to things granted by the admin user. In Perch 2 we have developed a full ACL with user and group permissions. You can now do things like create an HR Group who can only edit job postings. When upgrading from Perch 1 you will find you have admins and editors with the same permissions as before – you can then edit these to suit your site.

List detail edit mode for large regions

If you have a multiple item region with lots of content editing it all on one page becomes difficult. You can switch any region into list detail edit mode creating a more natural way of editing this data and enabling larger more complex templates to be used.

Upgrading to Perch 2

Upgrades can be bought through your account. Buy an upgrade and then apply it to your license when you are ready to upgrade the site.

To make it easy for you to upgrade we’ve created an Upgrade app, installed like any other Perch official app. It will step you through the process of upgrading your content and app data to Perch 2. The complete upgrade instructions can be found in the new documentation site.

In other news…

We don’t make things easy for ourselves here at Perch HQ. In addition to shipping Perch 2 we’ve created a brand new documentation site, redesigned and rebuilt the website, added the ability for you to buy Perch licenses in Euro and US Dollars and shipped a new version of the Blog App – with the ability to have comments on your blog. Look out for some more posts here about all of these.