Introducing Perch 2

3 years ago we launched Perch – the really little CMS – and the past three years have been quite a journey. Our aim with Perch was to create an excellent little CMS for little sites and the interface and functionality of Perch was tailored for those kind of projects.

What we learned from Perchers was that Perch could be perfect for much larger sites with a lot of pages and content, but for a few details. We noted that the UI became strained and admin performance suffered once a site had large amounts of content. You told us that you really needed more roles for users within the control panel, in order that you could divide up your pages and have some editors who only had access to part of the site. You asked for better integration between the Pages app and Content, with better ways to generate site navigation.

Our challenge was to find a way to make Perch work for larger sites, without bloating the product for those of you who love how Perch works for small sites. We are committed to our basic use case and not making it more complex. You will always be able to drop in a couple of Perch Content tags and start editing. Yet we needed to support your sites as they grew.

Perch 2, announced today and to be released in July, is our response to that challenge.

What is new about Perch 2?

We have integrated the Pages functionality into Perch, so it’s no longer a separate app. Adding new pages will always be an option as we know that many of you would rather that users only edit content and not add new pages. If you are not enabling new Pages that functionality is still hidden away.

Integrating Pages enables us to provide a better, more consistent experience within the control panel. It also means that we can provide far more options in terms of customizing the navigation generated when managing your pages through Perch.

Region ordering and naming

In Perch, region names were always derived from the filename, however, with the integrated Pages app you can now name your regions based on your navigation so your content tree more closely matches your site tree.

List and detail edit mode

One of the biggest issues large sites faced in Perch was the multiple-item regions with a lot of content became very slow to manage with all of the data on one page. In Perch 2 you have the option to switch these to a list/detail view which solves the issue and makes for a better, more responsive editing experience when dealing with multiple-item regions that have a lot of content.

If you like things the way they are, you can keep to the traditional way of managing these regions and the setting can be toggled on a per region basis depending on what works best for your content. You can even switch back and forth.

Fine-grained access control

Perch has always had the ability for two types of user – admin and editor. Administrators tend to be the designer of the site and an editor the client. However, many of you have asked for more fine-grained permissions so you can assign only part of the site to a user or group of users. This functionality is baked into Perch 2 giving you a full users and groups system.

Easier updates and backups

We have shifted the Perch core files out to a separate directory within the Perch folder, in order that upgrades can be as simple as replacing that core folder – no more worrying that you might overwrite your templates!

Lots of small improvements and more to come

We have made a large number of small improvements to Perch and also provided the basis for some of your other most requested features. To provide the features listed above Perch 2 required some major architectural changes and these will also enable us to bring you some more exciting functionality in the next few months.

However, if you upgrade an existing site you won’t get a nasty surprise. We are committed to supporting our basic use case and all of the functionality you rely on in Perch – including the existing add-ons. We are refreshing and improving parts of the User Interface however we do not intend to cause Perch to look unfamiliar to clients who are used to using it.

Upgrade policy and pricing

If you have bought a Perch license any time from 1st May 2012 up to the launch date of Perch 2 in July, you will be entitled to a free upgrade of that license if you wish. Once Perch 2 is launched, that ability to upgrade will be in your account.

Holders of older licenses will be able to upgrade at a reduced cost.

Perch 2 beta

Over the next month we will be running a beta to ensure that Perch 2 works well for everyone, if you are an existing Percher with a bit of time and the ability to test and explain issues clearly then we would love to hear from you. Details can be found here.