A glimpse of the Perch 2.9 UI
The biggest feature of the Perch 2.9 release will be the shiny new user interface for the Control Panel. We thought that you might like to see how this epic piece of work is coming along. Here is a little peek into the process.
The aim with this redesign is that Perch still feel like Perch. We don’t want people to hold off upgrading their sites because it would mean retraining clients, however we wanted to ensure that Perch would work really well when editing content from mobile devices and that the UI worked well for the far more complex sites that are being developed using Perch Runway. There were also a number of issues logged that could only be properly solved by addressing them in the UI.
Assets
One of the problems with Assets has always been the various sizes and shapes that these things come in. Solutions that work well for photos often don’t work so well for other items, and even with photos our existing solution of cropping them square means that people can’t tell the orientation of an image easily. We’ve addressed this in the UI with a new design for Assets that preserves aspect ratio.
You can also see some of the filtering and sorting functionality on this screenshot. Both Perch and Runway will have improved filtering and sorting for Assets, in Runway this ability will be extended across all content including Collections.
Responsive Tables
A CMS tends to have a lot of data tables, Perch is no exception. We’ve put work into trying to make these work far better when accessed on mobile devices. In the image below you can see two views of a table listing Assets – desktop and narrow mobile versions.
A Cleaner, Flatter UI
In general we’ve flattened out the UI, images are now SVG so they look lovely and crisp on all your displays, and everything has a little more breathing room.
New APIs for Add-on Developers
If you develop Perch Add-ons then you’ll be pleased to find that making them look like the rest of the UI is far simpler due to the new APIs for building up your App interface. There shouldn’t be too much to do to update existing add-ons either and we’ll provide a guide.
More soon!
We’re getting close to being able to show you much more of this. As always we won’t announce a release date until we are completely happy we can ship something that you will love, and that will delight your clients. However we want to be able to use the new UI on our own sites too, and so we’re working towards getting it into your hands as soon as is possible.