Perch V4 (and future) Megathread

  • I think development would be best done by a group of developers who are using perch and thus have a vested interest in maintaining perch for their own / public good. The registered developers who are professional well known developers with their reputation on the line would be ideal candidates to setup a working group to continue development. The list of registered developers has been wiped so it seems like third party development is no longer welcome.


    https://grabaperch.com/developers


    I think the sort of transparency that comes from open source projects would result in a better product than the current radio silence from a group of anonymous developers whos only interest in the project is the bottom line of their investments (It seems perch is low on their priorities compared to there other investments / overall bottom line).

  • 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.)

  • 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.

  • Going off of the download from https://account.perchcms.com/licenses/runway I've gone through and checked what's been changed / added. So in lieu of any release notes here's what I've found


    Most of the changes seem to be auto formatting and consolidating standard perch with runway. Then there are some minor style changes which basically just change some borders and drop shadows.


    There is a new "Features option" for the sidebar menu, but as far as I can tell this is the same as a menu item, just a bit harder to find where to add them.


    There is a new collection index which you can't get to without entering the URL yourself. I assume the indexes are to provide better search results but I can't see anywhere where they are used apart from creating editing and deleting them in the admin area. Unfortunately I don't know what triggers the creation of the tables so they can't be made anyway, maybe a feature in the future.


    There are a few echo "heress" left in as well but apart from that, that's everything.


    Hopefully the download is incomplete and there is more to come, but who knows?

  • Hi everyone. I installed Runway V4 yesterday, just to see what would happen! I found I could no longer login to the site dashboard, so I had to change one of the core authentication files to spoof license registration (the site was already registered and has an active key not used anywhere else). Proceed with caution - I was happy to risk the update on a personal site I could easily revert, I would not advise updating any client sites to v4 yet.


    Like everyone else, I've no idea why the new Perch team have stopped communicating and have now released half-baked software. I also have 85 live Perch licenses and am paying a monthly subscription for 50 of them - not sure what the future holds for them. Such a shame to see a great product ruined like this.

  • Quote from JamieT

    I will be severely F'ed off if support for standard Perch no longer exists.

    Same here. The sites I run are predominately smaller clients that have no need for the power of Runway.


    What's happened to.... "Perch, the really little CMS. Perch is designed to make building and editing small sites a breeze"


    I fear the cost of Runway upgrades just won't wash with these clients.

  • It's mostly confidence for me. Regular Perch's pricing with lifetime support for one licence fee was a bit of a steal, a price rise was long overdue. Seems the 'new' owners have shot themselves in the foot though. If they had changed Perch to an annual fee for support that could have been a decent revenue streamxfor then.


    I'm reluctant to commit a client to building their web presence on a platform such as Perch is now. Zero communication from the 'new' owners gives me very little assurance that issues will be dealt with.