Posts by walker

    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).

    I am glad the ssl issue has been fixed. I think the difference in opinion on how perch should be developed comes down to use case. If you are using perch professionally to sell websites to clients then these sorts of issues are show stoppers that will hurt your reputation / business. If you are using it for personal sites then you don't really care about reputation and all these issues become easily worked around.

    If development has been abandoned would the current owners consider letting Perch go open source? It would be a good legacy choice. I think there are enough community members left who would be willing to take it on.

    Yes just do this, there is such a great community behind perch they could simply outsource the development to the community and change their business to provide support around the open source project seems like it would make more money than keeping the lights on with a skeleton crew until perch customers move on to other software.

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    The SSL certificate expiry is just the grabaperch.com site, which has outdated info on it anyway, such as Drew's post from 2019 talking about version 4.

    This is a very good point not only have they let the certificate expire but they haven't even bothered to update the site after the purchase from the original creators, they are advertising version 4 as if its something being worked on when clearly its not.


    Quote

    Remember, the entire internet was once "http", it's not the end of world that it's expired.

    The internet was once static html so I guess its not the end of the world that perch is abandonware? I don't get your logic here.


    The point about the ssl certificate is not that I don't understand whats wrong, I understand the problem fine. The issue is that when I tell my customers we use perch for our CMS, the customer will then research it. They will search google for "Perch cms" and the first result takes them to a page that throws up a large security warning they won't understand, my customer gets scared off and goes to my competitor.


    The point is that getting a Let's Encrypt ssl certificate costs nothing and takes 5 minutes, where as them not fixing it costs me money. Of course I know the issue is that they don't realise its broken, thats why I emailed them over two weeks ago and its been radio silence, which is another red flag, they haven't checked their email in two weeks, no one is working on this project in any capacity.


    I suggest the same thing as ex-jedi archive everything you can so you can continue to support your customers regardless of what happens to perch. You can ignore the warning signs and take the risk if you want but don't be surprised if you wake up one day and find the domain has expired like the ssl certificate.

    It's not dead, you're posting on the perch forum right now aren't you? There's a few different domains, docs.grabaperch.com, perchrunway.com, account.perchcms.com. These are still running.

    The main website for perch grabaperch.com still has an expired ssl, I notified them of the problem last week and they still haven't bothered to fix it, I have used perch for the past 5 years and always got a response from Drew or Rachel within a few hours.


    Its worth re reading my post as I didn't blame anyone just stated what has been done in the past year and an obvious problem that has a quick and simple fix, that hasn't been fixed.


    I understand the challenges of working on multiple projects, inheriting some one elses code and working remotely. As a developer I face these challenges myself its my job to overcome these challenges and deliver the results my clients expect as outlined in the project road map. Every developer faces the same problems, we have all had to adapt to working remotely over lockdown and yet we still deliver results and communicate with our clients, the same can no longer be said of perch.


    More than that its hard to see what their planed future is there doesn't seem to be a roadmap and the developers have broken off all communication with their customers. It leaves me asking the question did they buy perch with no roadmap or production capability to develop it? Its a red flag for me.


    My current perch sites im keeping I don't see the need to rebuild them perch is rock solid and easy to maintain, I doubt I will have any problems maintaining Drew and Rachels code. Im using craft for all my new projects and am finding it a great replacement for perch.

    Yea this is a dead project they even let the ssl on their domain expire. The only significant update in the past two years? patches php8 support something that a decent developer should be able to do in a week or less.


    The two man band before them where able to maintain perch and release new features while still keeping up their day job. The new much larger team cant seem to get a roadmap on paper.


    I have been reading some of their "responses" in the forum, they say nothing but try to put blame on their customers for expecting them to work on the project. The Perch v4 thread is full of people asking for changes / updates and the response from the team is that "I accept that change is not always welcomed" in a thread where users are literally crying out for change this is huge red flag for me.


    Farewell perch it was great while it lasted, and a big thank you to Drew, Rachel and of course Clive for all the work you have done on this project.

    What will you sell instead?

    Ill sell anything the client will buy thats not Wordpress. Wordpress is the only thing clients have heard of, they know they can edit the site themselves and can take it to another developer if they want, no lock in. I used to try and sell the client on Joomla but the plugin subscription model was hard for the client to stomach, a subscription makes it look like a service then they get scared of lock in.


    Since I ditched Joomla three years ago for perch its been great. They are worried it will be difficult to edit, I show them the backend of another clients website and they say "WOW thats a lot easier than Wordpress!". They are worried about lock in, I tell them its a one time price for an open source professional cms that they can then take to any developer and they are sold.


    I will still try and sell my clients on perch, as I think its the best option for them but if I fail they get what they want (most likely wordpress) and you don't get paid. I apologise if my tone comes across as critical, I'm fine with the new model, I am just trying to pass on my clients concerns as ultimately they are the ones paying for perch and making the decision to use it, not me.

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    I have got a bit further in debugging it. When I edit the user it updates the memberProperties column in the database but then doesn't render those changes like its being cached.


    I was right. The member properties are pulled from the database and stored in the users session at login. When you call perch_member_get to get a member property it comes from the users session not from the database. This means that the database and user session can get out of sync where the backend shows whats in the database and the front end shows whats in the now out of date session.



    To fix the issue


    I added a new function to the end of "perch_members/runtime.php" called perch_member_sync() which updates the user session from the database.



    I then call perch_member_sync(); at the top (before any data is sent to the user) of any frontend page that was giving me issues.

    > I did a great deal of research about 3 years ago on which CMS I wanted to use, quality, speed, flexibility, control and price were all factors that lead me to Perch.


    Me too but things change in 3 years and my loyalty is to my clients. Joomla extensions have a similar pricing / support model as perch 4 so I am fine with the new model. The old pricing / support model was better than Joomla now it's the same, thats fine but I find clients really don't like the Joomla support model, so I will have a harder time selling perch to clients, so I'm not going to sell as much perch, thats all i'm saying.

    Sorry, Im creating the member in the backend, when I create the user it takes the file fields and it creates the user like I expect. But when I then go to edit the member again in the backend it shows all the file fields as empty. I try uploading the files again or different files but it still shows the file fields as empty on the backend, on the front end it still shows the original files uploaded when the member was created.


    I have got a bit further in debugging it. When I edit the user it updates the memberProperties column in the database but then doesn't render those changes like its being cached.


    Update

    I have discovered the same issue with the textarea tag, the code below has been updated to fix this issue too.

    Solution

    While PerchFieldType->render_inputs($details) looks for $id in $details for whatever reason PerchFieldType_file->render_inputs($details) looks for 'perch_'.$id in $details doesn't find it and things the field is blank. The front end caches the member details in their session, to clear the cache log out and in.


    To fix the backend copy and paste the below code after the opening <?php in "addons/apps/perch_members/modes/members.edit.post.php".



    Code
    1. $PerchedDetails = [];
    2. foreach ($details as $key => $value) {
    3. if (is_array($value)) {
    4. $PerchedDetails['perch_'.$key] = $value;
    5. } else {
    6. $PerchedDetails[$key] = $value;
    7. }
    8. }
    9. $details = $PerchedDetails;

    I have used the old forum for support a lot in the past and thought it was a great solution. I have gotten fast support from the helpful and friendly community, and expert advice and knowledge from Drew and Rachel. I appreciate that its open as I have been helped so many times from other people who have already asked and answered my question.


    The new forum and wording (from support to forum) makes me worried, is developer support no longer a thing? Was it ever supposed to be a thing? Installing a forum and then relying on your community to support your product really isn't support. While the documentation is good it isn't good enough to stand on its own.


    For an extra 50 dollars craft cms does everything perch does, has more documentation and more importantly developer support. The weakened commitment to support kills perch's offering as a professional cms, and it worries me a lot.

    I have added a few file fields to the member.html template so it looks like below.


    Code
    1. <perch:members type="text" id="first_name" label="First name" listing="true" order="1" />
    2. <perch:members type="text" id="last_name" label="Last name" listing="true" order="2" />
    3. <perch:members id="document1" type="file" label="Document 1" order="3">
    4. <perch:members id="document2" type="file" label="Document 2" order="3">
    5. <perch:members id="document3" type="file" label="Document 3" order="3">
    6. <perch:members id="document4" type="file" label="Document 4" order="3">
    7. <perch:members id="document5" type="file" label="Document 5" order="3">
    8. <perch:members id="certificate1" type="file" label="Certificate" order="4">


    When I create a new member in the backend it shows all the new fields, I can upload files and it all works great.


    After saving the member, these fields are then empty, I try uploading a different file but it wont take the files are still missing on the backend and they are still the origional files from when I created the member on the front end.