Announcing Perch 1.6

It’s update time again, and Perch 1.6 brings a number of new features to help make keeping your site up-to-date even easier.

The first thing we wanted to address in this release was the naming of items in multi-item regions. Many of you are as tired as we were of dealing with the Item 1, Item 2… list for navigating around a region, and wanted some way of being able to give each item a name. Well, good news! You can now set title="true" on one of your template’s content tags to signify that the value of that field should be used as the item title. It works really well.

Next up, we wanted to add some features that will help give your clients confidence in making changes to their sites. We know that lots of you have clients who perhaps aren’t quite so web-savvy and can be nervous of clicking on the wrong thing and making a mess of their site. We want Perch to be enjoyable to use, and part of that is having the confidence to know you can’t make big mistakes. So we’ve added three new features to really help boost that confidence level.

The first of those is Save As Draft, which enables you to commit your changes to region without making them live on the site. This is great for making edits to long pages where you don’t want to have lots of unsaved work in your browser. Save As Draft and keep revising until you’re ready.

Once a region has been saved as a draft, you can then preview the change, live on your site. This is great for checking that the changes you’ve made are going to show up exactly how you expect. If you have lots of regions on a page, preview will always show the most up-to-date version or draft. This means you can prepare lots of changes in advance, preview them and then make them live when you’re happy.

The third new feature is to help out when you’re not happy with your changes. We’ve added multi-level undo so you can quickly and easily back out of a change if you make a mistake or just aren’t happy with the result. Undo keeps an exact snapshot (including images and file uploads) of the last 15 edits, so it’s always easy to step back to a previous version if you change your mind.

We really hope these will help to give non-technical users the confidence to push ahead without worrying about mistakes, as well as providing useful functionality for us web folk, too.

We’ve made dozens of other small changes and fixes, including new icons, better error messages and a clever way to add a Google map to your site. Read all the nitty-gritty and find the update instructions on the update page.

As always, the update to Perch 1.6 is free to existing customers. We hope you enjoy it!