Perch Blog 3.5

Today we have made live a new version of the Blog App for Perch 2, Blog Version 3.5. This post is to explain some of the new features that can be found in the app. Before upgrading your Blog App you will need to upgrade Perch to Perch 2.0.6.

WordPress import

We know that many people were waiting for an import tool in order that you can easily move a WordPress blog over to Perch, and this functionality is now included in Blog. Read the documentation for more information on how to do this. Currently WordPress is the only format we are importing however if there is call for other importers we can write them – so let us know.

Simpler “friendly” URLs

We have included a Setting and some functionality to make it easier to rewrite your URLs using mod_rewrite. See the Clean URLs documentation for full details.

Performance optimizations and other tweaks

In addition to making some optimizations so your blog listings will load faster we have added the ability to display a comment count in your templates; a feature to exclude certain categories and tags when filtering; you can also edit authors assigned to posts.

We are updating the documentation to detail all of these enhancements.

Blog app example pages

The example pages included in this version of Blog are the first to make use of the Feathers functionality and therefore require the Quill Feather. If you are not using our example pages but instead creating your own then you do not need Quill.