Perch on Perch

On Monday we relaunched the Perch website. Unless you have logged into your account or bought a new license then you may not have noticed any difference. However it’s all change under the hood.

Perch will be five years old at the end of May 2014. Five years ago we were working on version 1. Those of you who have been with us since those early days might remember that version 1 of Perch was a really simple content editor. It had no facility to add new pages, you could upload images – but not resize them, there was no API and so no add-ons like Blog or Events. Perch 1 wasn’t designed to be the sort of thing that you ran an online business from, but a small CMS for those sites where you just need to edit a few bits of content.

So we built grabaperch.com on the CMS framework that we had developed prior to launching Perch. That framework was what we used for the larger client projects we developed as an agency. It shared with Perch a hands-off approach to markup and a lot of learning from that framework went into Perch, but it was a very different product.

We redesigned the site when we launched Perch 2, but didn’t have to time to consider whether we would be able to move to Perch then. One of the issues was that bundled up in the site was all of the account data that allows you to buy and manage licenses. Moving from one thing to another is more than just redeveloping a website.

As Perch has developed into far more than a content editor, we started to become frustrated with our website. Frequently one of us would complain how some change would have been much easier if we were on Perch. It was time.

Slowly we have been working away on rebuilding our infrastructure. Behind the scenes is a new system that manages account data. It’s going to better allow us in future to link together your account across support, the demo system, mailing lists and the website. The Perch site is now running on Perch, using our add-ons for the Blog, Podcast section and to pull in the Twitter favourites that appear in the footer. The custom work uses the Perch API to develop a custom app that interfaces with the separate accounts system so that you can buy licenses and manage them on the site.

We’ve been able to roll out a more streamlined license layout and better support for downloading your order invoices. We’ve also switched our credit card processing to Stripe (while still supporting PayPal).

We’re really excited to have our site on Perch. It shows how far we have come, and it also means that we’re learning about managing a complex site on our own software – which will bring new features to Perch. It already has. The improved SSL support in Perch 2.4.7 was developed because we saw a need to make it easy to enforce SSL on certain pages and be able to switch it off for local development.