Introduction
Hello folks
It's been a busy month for me outside work but quiet for my freelance web business. That sometimes happens and I'm not overly concerned. However, one benefit is that I've been able to find the time to rebuild my own site and, in the process, realise that there are much better ways to do things with Perch now compared with a few years ago. For example, my default pages are much cleaner (they comprise just a few PHP lines) and my Perch templates are fewer. I'm hoping to end up with a single "Content Blocks" template to rule them all!
And, rebuilding the site has meant a complete revision of my basic site framework so that float-based layout has been replaced by Flexbox and CSS Grid. They are fantastic to work with.
I'm hoping to launch the new site in the next few weeks.
See you next time.
News
Perch Blog app - what features/changes would you like to see?
Suggest new features and/or changes for the Blog app in this forum thread.
Add-Ons
Product list field type
The product list field type can be used to select products from the official Perch Shop app. The field type displays the product in a dropdown list (like the Category field) and allows you to select more than one product.
Perch Auto Collapsible Dividers
A UI script for Perch to make dividers closed initially.
This Addon for Perch makes it possible for dividers to initially be collapsed. Normally field dividers in Perch templates are all open. This takes a lot of screenspace for fields that are not used that often.
Also you can add end-dividers. These end-dividers are then hidden in the admin interface. There purpose is to be able to define the end of a divider section. Normally a divider ranges from the divider to another divider or to the end of the template. With the invisible end-divider you can determine the complete range of a divider without adding unnecessary dividers in the user interface.
How Do I?
Display Similar Products
A common strategy on e-commerce sites is to include a list of similar products on the product detail page. In this post I’ll go through how you can achieve this in Perch Shop. And with the help of the productlist field type, I’ll explain how you can manually select similar products or create a list of accessories.
A great post describing a very common shop/ecommerce pattern,
Site Examples
Chestnuts Day Nursery
A great-looking site built with Perch Runway by Marc Sanders. Uses content from multiple collections and custom filters to manipulate data for output.
Perch Documentation
All about Perch Blocks
Using Blocks has to be one of the best things about Perch. Here's how they work.