2018 Wrapped

Let’s review what happened in the Perch universe in 2018 and have a look at what significant updates Perch got, what the Perch community has been up to and how was this site’s first year.

Perch and Perch Runway

Along many small additions, improvements and bug fixes, there were some significant ones including:

1. Non self-closing template tags

Since Perch 3.1, you no longer need to self-close Perch tags:

<!--* Self-closing tag *-->
<perch:content id="heading" type="text" label="Heading" />

<!--* Non self-closing tag *-->
<perch:content id="heading" type="text" label="Heading">

2. Boolean attributes

Also, since Perch 3.1 you no longer need to set an attribute to true. You can simply add it without setting a value and Perch will assume it is true:

<!--* required attribute set to true *-->
<perch:content id="heading" type="text" label="Heading" required="true">

<!--* required attribute with no value is assumed to be true *-->
<perch:content id="heading" type="text" label="Heading" required>

3. Field Groups

Perch 3.1 also added a Field Groups allowing you to make longer edit forms more user-friendly:

<perch:group label="Publishing and SEO">
    <perch:content id="status" type="select" options="Inactive|inactive,Active|active" label="Status">
    <perch:content id="meta_title" type="text" label="Meta Title" no-index>
    <perch:content id="meta_desc" type="textarea" label="Meta Description" size="s" no-index>
</perch:group>

4. Bulk Delete

Perch 3.1.2 added a new method to PerchAdminListing, enable_bulk_action(), allowing app developers to let users bulk delete items in a listing.

5. Update Collection items via API

Perch 3.1.2 added the ability to update and delete Runway Collection items via Import API. This opened the door to a wide range of possibilities.

For instance, you can now sync the content items stored in a third-party service with a Runway Collection items.

The Perch community

It’s good to see the community getting a bit more vocal. Not only by expressing their love for Perch, but also in helping other fellow Perch developers.

Perchology Newsletter reach 50

The Perchology Newsletter sends a curated publication full of interesting, relevant links about Perch CMS. It’s run by Clive Walker. The newsletter has sent out 50 issues as of today!

The newsletter has been running since July 2016 and reaching the inbox of many web developers and designers, some of whom are freelancers or run their own agencies. If you’re a company or an individual that offers services relevant to this type of audience, you may want to sponsor some of the upcoming issues.

Perchology Slack channel

The Perchology Slack channel is also run by Clive Walker.

Relative Paths

Relative Paths is a web design and development podcast hosted by Ben Hutchings and Mark Phoenix. On its 55th episode, Ben and Mark chatted with Drew McLellan, co-creator of Perch CMS, about Perch and Perch Runway.

You can listen to the episode here.

Third-party add-ons

There’s been an increase of third-party add-ons and many Perch developers have open-sourced theirs and published them on GitHub. Clive Walker has been keeping a list of these.

Pipits

This site was launched in late November 2017. It’s now a little over a year old. Several add-ons were released and 20-something blog posts were published covering a range of topics from the basic (such as the use of perch_get()) to the more advanced topics exploring the Perch API.

Looking forward to 2019

I’m excited for 2019 and I can’t wait to share with you what I’ve been working on.

Besides what I have planned you can help me improve the content on here by giving me some feedback. What do you like and not like about the posts? Do you find them helpful and easy to follow? What topics would you like to learn more about? What are you finding difficult to wrap your head around in Perch?

Feel free to contact me via [email protected]

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