2019 Wrapped
2020 is almost here. So it is a good time to reflect on what happened in 2019. Let’s take a look.
Perch is Ten!
Perch first launched back on 31 May 2009. It has been around for ten years! This is impressive for a self-funded product. So congrats to Rachel Andrew and Drew McLellan on their incredible journey.
Did you know that someone ran the same version of Perch for 8 years?!
Perch v4
On Perch’s 10th anniversary Perch v4 was announced. The announcement detailed some of the up coming changes:
- Improved control panel UI
- Dark mode for control panel
- Cloud backups for regular Perch
- New add-ons directory (to which registered developers can publish their own add-ons)
- Open-source docs (see it on GitHub)
Throughout the year the activity on the community forum suggested some additional changes we may see in v4, though not officially announced:
- Drew posted a poll and when questioned about it his response indicated the he was working on improving the way add-ons are developed
- potentially a better way to manage routes
- possibly better indexing for Collection items
- a better more developer-friendly way to manage Collections
- perhaps some changes to revisions
- built-in paired tag parser for template handlers
v4 license model
The v4 announcement also explained how the current license model has become unsustainable and a new license model was proposed. Many developers in the community were excited by this announcement because it indicated that Drew/Rachel would be able to focus more on Perch again. However, not all customers were happy to hear about it. Nonetheless, it is only a matter of time until we get v4.
There is a discussion thread on the forum about this subject.
Perch Community
Perchology
The Perchology newsletter and Slack group are still going strong. Many thanks to Clive Walker for keeping Perch developers connected and updated on anything Perch-related.
Spreading the Perch knowledge
It is always great to see developers and agencies sharing their Perch knowledge and workflows. Here are some Perch articles from 2019:
- Using Perch as our CMS - by Root Studio
- Perch Apps: Adding functionality to your site - by Root Studio
- WordPress plugins, who needs them? - by Root Studio
- Installing Craft CMS, Statamic and Perch Runway on Laravel Valet - by Scott Gruber
- Laravel Mix, minus the Laravel? - by Jordin Brown
- Configuring PerchCMS with PHP dotenv - by Jordin Brown
- Keeping it clean and tidy with multilingual Perch builds - by Simon Kelly (chopperoon)
- The benefits of choosing Perch CMS against WordPress as your website’s content management system - by Márton Lente
Pipits
Blog
In 2019, I only published 12 blog posts. A single post per month on average. It was fewer than my goal for the year, but I am happy with number of posts I have published particularly when I take my increased workload this year.
New add-ons
I have open-sourced a number of Perch add-ons in 2019 including:
The goal is not quantity, but purpose. Some of the add-ons I open-source are there to fill a gap such as the UI Loader app and the Collection field type. I would be happy to retire these if v4 tackles the problems these add-ons solve.
Goodbye Catalog?
I don’t think I will continue maintaining Pipit Catalog, the first open-source Perch app I released. I may make it v4-compatible when Perch v4 comes out, but that would be the end of it.
The control panel features need to be available natively in Perch Shop to give store admins a seamless user-friendly experience. Pipit Catalog was intended to be a temporary solution from the very start. It’s been around for 2 years now. It has done its job.
What does the data say?
According to Google Analytics the grabapipit.com website in 2019 had:
- 2,844 users
- 4,659 sessions
- 11,687 page views
The majority of the traffic is coming from the UK, followed by the US. There’s also a lot of traffic coming from Germany, Australia, Netherlands, Spain, Canada and India.
2020
Switching to Fathom Analytics
I’ve been using Google Analytics on grabapipit.com, but it is time to switch to the privacy-focused Fathom Analytics.
grabapipit.com v2
I’m working on redesigning grabapipit.com. Given the number of blog posts and the fact that most of visitors come to the site for the blog, one of the main goals of the redesign is to make searching the blog posts easier. There are other things I would like this redesign to address, but I’ll be sharing these with you later.