Upgrading to Perch 2

As you may have read, Perch 2 has landed! If you’ve got an existing site that you would like to upgrade to Perch 2, we’ve tried to make that as easy as possible. We’ve also got a special discount if you get in early.

Buying an upgrade

Moving from Perch 1 to Perch 2 is a paid upgrade at a reduced price. Until the end of July, upgrade for the special price of just £15 (€20/$25).

To make things as flexible as possible, upgrading a license is a two-step process. The first step is to buy an upgrade. You can do this from the license list in your account. You can do this at any point – it doesn’t require you to make any changes to your site straight away.

If you bought a Perch 1 license on or after 1st May 2012, you’ll find that you have a free upgrade to that license available in your account already.

Once you’ve bought an upgrade, it becomes available to apply to a license – that’s step 2. This step requires you to make a change to your site. You’ll be given a new license key and will need to add that to your perch/config/config.php file to be able to continue using Perch. That’s why we’ve made it two steps – so you can buy the upgrade now, and then apply it when you’re next working on your site.

Upgrading a site

We’ve written some detailed instructions on the process of upgrading a site. We recommend doing it as an offline process in your development environment, and then deploying the site.

Broadly, the process is to move your existing Perch 1 folder, and then install a fresh Perch 2. After copying your resources and templates over to the new install, you then use the special Upgrade app to import your content from the old database tables to the new. It’s quite straightforward.