Perch Add-on Developers

We’ve had an API for Perch from early on. All of the official add-ons are built using that API, and we know that a large number of you build add-ons using the API for your own use or for specific projects. We feel there is a huge opportunity for some of you to start creating your own, commercial add-ons, and we’d love to know what we can do to encourage that.

It is possible that we put people off selling add-ons due to the fact we have stated in the past that we will always put our customers first, and would never want to see a situation where it was common knowledge that to use Perch you also had to purchase a bunch of other things.

That is still the case, however there is a huge opportunity to create add-ons that fulfill more specific needs, or an alternative to something we already do. A great example would be image galleries. We have a free Gallery add-on that enables some common use-cases for displaying galleries of images. It is deliberately simple and expects that people will develop their own front-end code for displaying galleries. Someone could easily come along and develop a really fully featured Gallery application for Perch as a commercial add-on for those who have greater needs.

We discussed this issue in greater detail in Episode 20 of the Perch podcast. However, along with large or specific add-ons there are a whole bunch of ways to extend Perch.

You can create Field Types, these can be simple things like an alternative date picker through to more complex things such as our Google Maps field type.

You could create Feathers for specific CSS and JavaScript functionality or even completely built out site pages and templates. Look at the demo sites we have on GitHub for examples of how sites that just need Perch dropping in can work.

You can create Dashboard Widgets (with or without app functionality backing them) or even provide Editor Plugins or other admin customizations.

We really think there is a great opportunity for PHP developers to provide add-ons to Perch. We have a huge customer base who understand the value of paying for good, well-supported code. The product itself is mature and doesn’t change rapidly, and because we use the API for our first-party add-ons it is very functional. With no-one doing this yet, someone could easily come in and become the leading third-party developer for the platform.

Drop us a line if you have an idea for an add-on. We’re keen to encourage developers to create things for Perch and we’ll be happy to advise.

We’d also like to know what would be helpful from our end. If we start to see activity in terms of third party add-ons then creating some kind of marketplace would be possible, however until then we would be happy to help you promote the things you are doing to the community.