2020 Wrapped

It’s been a very long challenging year for all of us. Now is a good time to un-judgingly look back at what happened in the Perch world.

Perch releases

There were only a couple of Perch core releases to fix some compatibility issues for PHP 7.x and MySQL 8. The latest Perch release is v3.1.7 which is compatible with PHP 7.4.

Given the lack of releases is worrying some developers in the community, it is worth noting that PHP 7.4 will continue to receive security support until 28 November 2022. So if your worst fear comes true, you have until then to migrate existing Perch sites to other solutions. You can always refer to the official PHP page for supported versions.

Perch v4

There is still no official release date for Perch v4. Official announcements during 2020 did not reveal a lot. So unfortunately we will have to wait a little longer to find out what comes next for Perch.

Perch docs

While there were not many software releases, the documentation received a decent amount of updates including:

PHP 8

PHP 8 was released in November 2020. If you are interested to learn about what is new in PHP 8, you can check out Laracast’s PHP 8 Crash Course or BeyondCode’s What’s new in PHP 8 course.

Pipits

Blog

I published 16 blog posts, which is 4 more than 2019. I don’t keep count during the year, and somehow at the end of this year I felt I wrote less in general. So I’m pleased with this!

Add-ons

Besides updates to various existing add-ons, I released 2 new ones. This year I focused on making it easier for Perch developers to build CRUD applications with the new Pipit Members app and the Members field type.

I’ve also worked on the Pipit app to provide helper functions focused on forms. You can now submit forms to Perch with Javascript (regardless whether you are using a Perch-template form, or a normal HTML form) and receive a JSON response back so you can programmatically handle errors and success states. Read the documentation of the pipit_form_response() function to learn more.

2021

Besides publishing new blog posts, I have no concrete plans for Pipits in 2021. It is unlike me to not be optimistic for what’s to come in a new year, but we’ve gone through a lot in 2020.

This time last year I started redesigning grabapipit.com. I didn’t like what I came up with so I hired a designer. Unfortunately I chose to press pause. 2020 has not been kind on us and it was not the best time. Hopefully if we see Perch v4 during 2021, I may start investing in the redesign again. I have also pressed pause on a number of Perch add-ons I was working on. It is a shame because I was extremely excited to make these available for Perch developers.

Previous Years

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