Posts by nilsmielke

  • Perch V4 (and future) Megathread

    This whole mess is a total disaster for our client relations. What am I to tell my clients, that I sold Perch to with the highest praise? I once was convinced it was a brilliant product. Not any longer. This will not end well for us as a small company, I am afraid.

  • Perch V4 (and future) Megathread

    Also, if I click the “Buy a license” button in my account, it tells me to buy a `Perch 4.0 single website license` @ € 65 as well as a `Perch Runway 4.0 single website license` @ € 219.
    How am I going to explain to my 29 Standard Perch clients, that they will have to pay € 284, plus my work to transfer their site to Runway, for their next update? Some of them are tiny companies.
    I might as well convince them to switch CMSes. Might be the easier sell, as things stand with the new owners’ communications and all.
    (Sorry, am getting exceedingly bitter over this whole mess.)

  • Perch has a new home!

    Quote from ex-jedi

    My last day of work for 2021. I really did have high hopes that Perch would thrive, but this has been a very disappointing year. I hope things will change next year, but as it stands the next Perch licence I buy will be my last. This makes me very sad indeed.

    Agreed. This is a mess.

  • Backup App: brackets in DB password don’t get escaped

    I have recently had weird problems with the Backup App (current version in Perch 3.1.7) not running as expected.

    Initializing a backup in Admin always led to the following error in an otherwise blank page in the browser:

    Code
    1. File 'backup/backup.sql' does not exist [code -4]


    The server admin came across the following error in the Apache error logs:

    Code
    1. sh: 1: Syntax error: ")“ unexpected

    As that didn’t give a lot of background info, the server admin started digging deeper and at some point came to the revelation, that it might be related to a closing bracket in the DB password.
    Changing the password solved our problem.


    Nonetheless, this problem should not occur in the first place.

    We suspect it originates from line 69 in PerchBackup.class.php:

    Code
    1. exec($mysqldump_path.' --opt --host='.PERCH_DB_SERVER.' --user='.PERCH_DB_USERNAME.' --password= '.PERCH_DB_PASSWORD.' '.PERCH_DB_DATABASE.' > backup/backup.sql’);

    Here, the characters in PERCH_DB_PASSWORD, that might cause harm, should be escaped.

    Please consider updating the Backup App asap.

    Thank you.

  • Perch has a new home!

    Thank you rachelandrew and drewm for all your hard work on Perch (and in the web community in general). All the best for your future endeavors.


    Welcome to the “family” (it does get very snugly in the Perch Slack at times 😋), George G and team.
    I am looking forward to working on many more Perch-powered websites.

  • Secure downloads: 1st download works, downloads 2+ fail

    The problem seems to have been (I will not hold my breath it will run smoothly for too long, as I had quite a few Perch-related issues with this project already), that I referenced the site’s root inside my download.php like this:

    PHP
    1. <?php
    2. $root = $_SERVER['DOCUMENT_ROOT'];
    3. include($root . '/perch/runtime.php');

    Changing that to the actual, relative path like so solved the issue:

    PHP
    1. <?php
    2. include('../../perch/runtime.php');

    I used the former on the old server without problems and still use it to include the /perch folder in all other pages. Only for the download.php file it broke functionality.

  • Secure downloads: 1st download works, downloads 2+ fail

    Hey forum, hope you can help me solve this.

    I have a client website (standard Perch v3.1.7) with the Members App installed. I set up secure downloads as described in the docs (https://docs.grabaperch.com/ad…mbers/examples/downloads/).
    When there is more than one secure download displayed in a page, the first download initiated works as expected. Trying to start a second download, though, fails. The browser (Firefox on macOS in my case) reports “failed” (in the screencast “fehlgeschlagen” as it is German).

    When SHIFT-reloading the page (to purge the browser cache—no pun intended), the download of a second file works. Every try after that fails again.


    Here’s the screencast (MP4, 22s): https://zam.uber.space/sec-downloads.mp4

    At 00:15 the page is SHIFT-reloaded.


    I had this working before, but had to move servers, as the hosting company retired the old infrastructure.

    I checked the error logs and was in touch with the hosting provider, but there does not appear to be an issue with the hosting and/or server setup.

    Any ideas, how to attack this from a different angle, are appreciated.

    Cheers, Nils



    Here’s the (short) diagnostics summary:


  • Members App – Can members delete their account?

    Quote from hus_hmd

    You can add a tag to the member with perch_member_add_tag(). So you can set up a form and on submission you can add a tag to the logged in member to mark the deletion/deactivation of their account, and log them out.

    Many thanks hus_hmd, the Add Tag way is a pretty good idea.
    I will have to figure out, how to either notify the moderator of that, so he/she can delete the account for good, or how to automate that with a cronjob.


    Quote

    This feature already exists. Go to Members > Forms and you should find the registration form listed there. You can enable the "New members require approval" option and enter the email address of the moderator so they are notified when a new member signs up.

    Yeah, I know, I was just giving that as a reference, to how I would like the detetion to work. 😊

  • Members App – Can members delete their account?

    Is there a function available for members registered through the Members App to delete their account—or mark their account as deleted for the admin to remove it from the app?

    I am thinking of something similar to moderated registration, where the admin has to activate the member accounts.

  • Perch v4 license model

    Quote from ex-jedi

    As someone who has benefitted from re-using licences, I've even been given a few old and unused ones, it seems way to generous. I'd accept licences being permanently locked after a year. A new project should mean a new licence.

    Couldn’t agree more.