Posts by justanotherdave

Quote from TheOldDesigner

justanotherdave have a look at HTTPS://expressionengine.com

craft was born out of expression engine when it was a commercial CMS it’s now gone open source with a flourishing and good quality plug in community. I have tried both but EE is a better fit for my needs and I found the tag logic easier to understand . Also has a Fully featured e-commerce plugin as well as a cheaper alternative.

Thanks, it looks good I might have to give it go. Would the commerce solution you mentioned be the CartThrob Add-on?

I've always been a bit apprehensive of using open source when it comes to a CMS, as with no money changing hands they tend to get forgotten about when the developers lose interest and move onto something else. That's one of the reasons I went with Perch, which is kind of ironic given the circumstances.

I really hope Perch does continue and things turn around.

A viable alternative might be Craft CMS - https://craftcms.com. It's looks kind of what Perch could have been if development hadn't of stalled a few years back. It has an e-commerce option too. It's expensive though. You're looking at $1,200 per site with e-commerce included and then $259 / yr after that. It's not too bad at $299 per project and $59 / yr without e-commerce though. I might give it a go. I kind of hate e-commerce anyway so I could just up my prices for that as it's not something I really want to compete on price for. I guess it just goes to show that Perch's pricing system really wasn't sustainable in the long-term.

Anyone else know of any other CMS that is like Perch and also well supported? I've used Wordpress before and don't like it so I don't want to go that route.

I often use Perch in this way. The vast majority of the site is static, with the client updating something like a restaurant menu on one page or maybe a blog. It's what I like most about the platform and the main reason why I use it. Compared to creating a Wordpress theme it's a doddle and takes a fraction of the time.

Quote from JayW

That sounds like uncommon user error.

SKU's are widely understood as needing to be unique, it's the whole point. Entering "GRE" for both green and grey sounds like someone needs to type "what is an SKU" into Google! We need less distractions towards V4, not more!

Yep. It's user error. But in an area where a client is expected to enter data, just saying it needs to be unique isn't really good enough. If it's a shop with a lot of products or options they're likely not going to know if it's unique or not, especially for options.

It would be better for the system to pick this up and inform you that the SKU you've entered isn't unique, rather than just allowing it with no feedback and then just not working. Any other CMS I've used other than Perch will either tell you it's not unique or put a number on the end to make it unique. So most clients that have used other e-commerce solutions before aren't going to be worried about if what they've entered is unique or not.

I realise there's more pressing issues for V4 and shop. But your response reads like this isn't worth the hassle and should just be ignored? When it IS an issue that needs fixing.

I don't think you can when creating the member through the Shop app. I've had this issue before. See this thread: Add telephone number to Shop addresses . You need to use cart properties instead.

Quote from Gareth S

granttransition

SCA is the main priority of the next release, it will be out ahead of the deadline, including allowing time for testing.

Am I right in thinking this is just for stripe payments. The PayPal payment option deals with the SCA on their side during the PayPal checkout?

Gareth S I'm just adding products to a Perch Shop install today. And one thing which would be an improvement is that the system needs to check for duplicate SKUs. The SKU for options and products etc need to be unique, but it the system doesn't actually check if they are and allows you to have duplicate SKUs, which don't work.

For example I created a colour option for my products, entered Green and Grey as options and used the first three letters as the SKU. So both were "GRE". I was able to enter these and save the options but then if I selected both green and grey as colours it would only create variants for the first entry which was green and completely ignore the grey option. As this is something a client would often do themselves I think it needs to check for duplicate SKUs and not allow you to create two which are the same.

Could you pass this on to the dev team?

Thanks

So Perch Shop works on PHP8 then?? For some reason I thought it didn't.

It would be great to have a download page somewhere for all the addons with versions. I know we have: https://addons.perchcms.com but unless I'm being dumb and have completely missed it, there's no way to easily check if any of these have been updated and that your site has the most current versions installed.

I'm hoping for something like £99/site with a years worth of updates and support then £49/year after that. I don't think they're going to confirm anything here though. It'll be a more official announcement.

I suspect the development has been outsourced overseas to be honest. The "development team" will be another company in India. Now I'm not saying there's anything wrong with that, it works for some people on a limited budget. But it can easily lead to issues with communication and they do tend to say yes to everything and give unrealistic timescales.

At this point I'd just be happy with Perch 3.3 with addons on PHP8. Take your time with V4 and do it correctly. I think a mistake here will lead the remaining Perch users to jump ship and it will be a very hard to replace them.

Quote from seoMatt

Gareth S any news on whether Perch version 3.2, blog and the other first party addons are fully compliant with PHP 8?

This. Having core on PHP8 is kind of pointless if the addons still need 7.X

Quote from Muscateer

I now have a working website by uploading the old backup. However, the cms wouldn't let me log in, so I upgraded core to the latest. The the same problem of blank pages occurred. So have reverted back to the old core.

The error i get trying to log into the cms is Sorry, your license key isn't valid for this domain.

Which isn't true. The upgrade usually solves this.

Any thoughts?

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This is probably due to PHP version. Older versions of Perch show this error on PHP versions above 7.1 I believe.

Not sure why this keeps getting marked as resolved. It's not resolved...

Perch V3.2 should work fine on 7.3. PHP 7.1, .2 (and .3 at the end of the year) are out of active support, including security updates. Which is probably why your host changed the minimum version. I would recommend updating Perch rather than downgrading PHP.

Quote from seoMatt

Thanks Gareth S

Does that mean that all of the addons for Version 4 are also ready to go? And is Version 3 along with all the main addons now PHP 8 compatible?

This. I have multiple sites using various versions of v3 and add-ons including blog, forms and shop. All need to be running on PHP8 by the end of the year as my host is discontinuing PHP7 support. I know there have been some recent updates to Perch core. But do the add-ons now also work with PHP8? There's been no mention that these have been updated too.

If V4 is going to come with a new subscription based payment model it would be great to have an update to V3 which includes PHP8 support, just so I don't have to move all my clients over to a new monthly or yearly subscription at once!

Just to confirm, Gareth S . Are addons also being tested and updated to work with PHP8?

I usually use the forms add-on on most of my sites, and often blog too. Shop would need to be updated to support PHP8 as well. Ideally all the first party addons. Otherwise the work on core is a little pointless. I would say the vast majority of perch sites would use at least one of the addons as well.

I assume all the addons support PHP 7.4 currently? As 7.3 is being deprecated on the 6th December and removed from my hosts supported PHP versions. Is there a version or update history page somewhere for the addons? So that I can check my sites have the latest addon versions when updating to Perch v3.2 or 3.3 when ready.

I've recently built my first shop using Perch and it's gone very smoothly. I'm pretty clueless when it comes to PHP I'm more of a front-end developer, but I've got there with no issues and I'm happy with the result, as is my client. I'll echo the comment above, I really like that I can just build the front-end of my shop exactly how I want. I've used Woocommerce in the past and that is an absolute nightmare to work with.

The docs for shop are OK, but they could do with some improvement. I think a video series like the current Blog add-on has with example files to follow along with would be a real help to new users.

Quote from hus_hmd

You would add it to your search results template.

If you really need to make all the Blog post fields available in search result, there are workarounds. I'll go over one:

Add conditional tags to separate the search results based on the source:

HTML

1. <perch:before>
2. <ul>
3. </perch:before>
5. <li>
6. <perch:if id="result_source" value="PerchBlog">
7. <!--* Search result from the Blog app *-->
8. <perch:else>
9. <!--* Everything else *-->
10. </perch:if>
11. </li>
13. <perch:after>
14. </ul>
15. </perch:after>

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Add a Perch Layout include and pass the result URL as a Layout variable:

HTML

1. <perch:if id="result_source" value="PerchBlog">
2. <!--* Search result from the Blog app *-->
3. <perch:layout path="blog_search_result" url="<perch:search id="result_url">">
4. <perch:else>
5. <!--* Everything else *-->
6. </perch:if>

Create /perch/templates/layouts/blog_search_result.php and filter the posts using the result URL:

PHP

1. <?php
2. perch_blog_custom([
3. 'template' => 'post_search_result',
4. 'filter' => 'postURL',
5. 'value' => perch_layout_var('url', true),
6. ]);

Create the template /perch/templates/blog/post_search_result.html and include any Blog post field you want.

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Hi hus_hmd , I'd just like to thank you for the instructions above . They worked perfectly for my search results page.

Gareth S I do think that it's strange the image isn't included by default. It's a very common use-case to include a thumbnail image when returning a search on a blog. Perhaps something to add for the next update to the Blog Add-on?

Quote from ex-jedi

Preach!!

+1 Please don't make Perch anything like Wordpress! I came to Perch because it wasn't like Wordpress (as I would think a lot of people here did).

I like how Perch isn't bloated. I don't think add-ons need to be part of core either. If you don't have a blog on your site you don't need the blog files cluttering up your project for example.

Off the top of my head, some improvements I think would be good in the future:

• Ability to have repeaters within repeaters.
• Google reCaptcha support much like the mbk addon for Perch Forms (which I don't think is in development any longer).
• Disable caching when Perch is in development mode. It used to work, but in later versions of PHP I still need to resave a region for changes to a template to take effect even when PERCH_PRODUCTION_MODE is set to PERCH_DEVELOPMENT.

Thanks for all the updates recently! Very much appreciated.

Thanks for this Clive. I've used your list before in the past, and it has been very useful.

There's also a small collection here, not add-ons as such but they have proved useful. Especially perch-redactor-default which enables all the extra menu options in the redactor wysiwyg text editor, and perch.novaextension for anyone who is using the new code editor from Panic Inc