Posts by ellimondo

Perch: The really small echo chamber

compositor Perch is not compatible with PHP 8.

- They updated to PHP 7.4 mid 2020 after much grumbling

- We've had just 5 updates in 3 years

- Most add ons are unmaintained, at worst broken

- Shop is a dead duck

- The dwindling but stoic community supports the product - there is no support available anymore.

This is a paid product with businesses built upon its foundations, so customers are bound to be unhappy and quite rightly are moving elsewhere. Which is sad, as you rightly point out – it was an excellent CMS with a really friendly community but goodwill only lasts so long and many of us are not happy.

So many problems! I can't understand why you can't get into the CMS when you can make changes on to the templates? Can't you get into ftp through the hosting and download the files from there?

From a glance at the errors above it looks like Varnish is running on your server. That's an eater of caches which might make your logins permanent. Have you tried turning it off in the hosting?

Hi

Take a copy of the site offline and work locally with debug and errors turned on as Clive suggests. Working on a live site is not ideal. If you can fix your css folder name at the same time that might help even the playing field. All those dots in a url are not really best practice imho.

Then summarise your problem, post your member page templates (preferably code formatted using the toolbar above) along with your diagnostic settings so the community can help you further. Otherwise I fear you are going to continue banging your head on a brick wall in the echo chamber of official Perch support.

Kind regards

Jon

Hi Tony

You can't nest related tags. You don't need the first related pair as you should already have that data available from your collection call at the page level – but I can't see that to be sure. I would probably want to perform a second collection call in the page template and match on the related tags (if any).

I wonder if, in this case, using categories would be a more convenient way of approaching this if all you are doing in the second collection is adding tags and filtering on them? Collection relationships are more suited for something like authors and books where each collection has its own independent taxonomy.

See the relationship docs right at the bottom of how to filter on related collections.

Jon

These old apps - events, gallery etc - should be pulled off the site.

Have you tried testing the forms through Mailtrap? That will prove form submissions are leaving the site / hosting server. After that it's normally an issue with the mailbox – especially if you are using an external email system to send responses through. They're probably sitting in a spam folder (knowing clients).

Another option is to use something like Postmark for all your transactional email handling. I haven't used it for Perch but it works brilliantly with Statamic. 10/10 from this old curmudgeon.

The only Office 365 install I've got has security set to define('PERCH_EMAIL_SECURE', 'STARTTLS'); and it works fine.

Hi

Is their 365 account really called enquries@… or is that a catchall or alias? With Office365 the PERCH_EMAIL_FROM must match the account name in order to validate.

Hi Tony

One quick win is to prevent bloat by reducing your config's history stack with PERCH_UNDO_BUFFER. I usually set mine to 3 in production and 1 locally. I think its default might be 30 which is a tad excessive!

You can also stop content indexing using the no-index attribute. NB This will also remove the item from search.

https://docs.grabaperch.com/te…butes/no-index-attribute/

Jon

Hi thanks Byron Fitzgerald! – I can confirm that I've got it working but not pushed it live yet. Trying to keep up with bloomin' client stuff! .

Hi

I am still getting the following error message with 3.1.7 and php 7.4.7:

Diagnostics:

You might need to run Perch Update again to clear those errors and see if it creates those missing DB columns. You can do that using /perch/core/update/?force=update

Clive's advice above is great btw. Your live site is running 2.7.8 which is pretty ancient so it may take a few incremental upgrade steps to get you up to the php 7 compatible version.

What PHP version is your live site on? I would be surprised if it's on PHP 7 and working correctly.

What about using `perch_content_create` in the header of your template page in the order you want them to appear in the admin page. And then control whether they are required on particular pages using page attributes. Could that work?

I wonder if your local PHP version is too new for your old Perch install. Perhaps you can downgrade PHP to 5.4 or similar while you update the site then switch to 7 once you are up to at least 2.8.34

Convert them to blocks?

Hi Byron Fitzgerald Thanks so much for this. Did you see my issue post on the Github page?

Try <perch:blog id="postID">

Adding <perch:showall> to the bottom of a template will show you what's available.

Hi. You need to update Perch to at least 2.8.34. Your web host has probably upgraded your web server to PHP 7.

Sorry my bad – in my hastily typed example the option should be 'page' not 'path'