Perch Update 2.0
16 July 2012
This major upgrade to Perch includes many new features and addresses many suggestions and requests made by our customers.
Upgrading from Perch 1.8.4 to 2.0 is a paid upgrade. You can buy an upgrade for any v1 license from your account. Upgrading is a two-step process. First, you need to buy an upgrade. Secondly, you can apply that upgrade to one of the licenses in your account. When applying the license, you’ll need to (at a minimum) update the license key in your Perch installation. This is why it’s a two-step process – enabling you to buy now, and apply the upgrade when you next work on the site.
Please read the upgrade instructions for full information on how to upgrade a Perch 1.8.4 site to Perch 2.0.
A new Upgrade app makes it easy to import your Perch 1 content into a new Perch 2 installation.
Do I need to install this?
No, you can continue to run Perch 1 without any problems. Perch 1 support will continue, and any security-related issues will be addressed. However, no new features will be added to Perch 1 at this point. Development has moved to Perch 2.
What features does it add?
- Integrated Pages app for streamlined management of pages and content
- New content tree designed to support sites with large numbers of pages
- Renaming and drag-and-drop reordering of pages within the site tree
- New reorganised and refreshed user interface
- List and detail edit mode option for multiple item regions
- Reorganised folder structure to make updating and backing up much easier
- New Field Type plug-ins
- New navigation and breadcrumb functionality
- The ability to add external links or non-Perch-managed pages to your structure
- The ability to include one template within another
- The ability to pass arbitrary data into a template at run time
- Better outgoing email options, with the ability to send via mail, sendmail or SMTP
- Content templates can be organised into folders to make large numbers of templates manageable
- Image field type can now output the resulting dimensions of resized images
- Field field type can output the file size of a file
- New data select field type – a select box with content drawn from another editable region
- System language is now a per-user option
- Configurable Users / Roles / Privileges access control system
- New Dashboard option, which can be extended by apps
- Retina-ready UI graphics
- Dozens of other small improvements
What impact does it have for my clients?
Perch 2 has a new user interface. It’s still very Perch-like, and is an evolution of the Perch 1 UI, not a revolution. They should be able to relearn quickly, and will find many tasks much more intuitive. However, more nervous clients may need someone to show them around the changes.
Where do I get the update?
Log into your account purchase an upgrade. When the upgrade is applied to a license, you’ll get a new license key and the download will been replaced with the newest version.