Forum

Thread tagged as: Suggestions, Discussion

Perch 2.9 - Fix all the things

18 months ago Perch 2.4 was our "fix all the things" release. It was a chance to go back over existing functionality and make sure that everything worked as well as it could, rather than focussing on adding new features.

Perch and Perch Runway 2.9 is going to be another one of those releases. One of the themes in the big What's your top feature request thread is improvements to existing features, so that's what we're looking at.

From your feedback we have note of features like:

  • Adding Assets support to MarkItUp, Redactor and CKEditor
  • Better controls for deleting entire pages
  • Improving asset bucket management
  • Including app version status in the diagnostics report
  • Improving image cropping options

What other improvements to existing features should we be looking at? We're not particularly looking for feedback on add-ons at the moment (feel free to post those to a new thread, of course) but we'd be interested in knowing your needs for both core Perch and Perch Runway.

Drew McLellan

Drew McLellan 2638 points

  • 6 years ago

Adding an option to allow editors to delete items from assets.

Improving asset bucket management

Does this include the asset panel updating for multiple buckets used on one page? I was going to make a topic on this as I've noticed if I had two or more buckets used then the asset panel will still show the first bucket opened if you then update something using a different bucket.

e.g.

  1. Click to add an image for an item with the bucket "apples", the asset panel opens showing the "apples" bucket.
  2. Following this, click to add an image for an item with the bucket "oranges", the asset panel opens but still shows the "apples" bucket.

Assets: Select multiple/all images and delete in one or two steps for admins. (Needed this to clone a project for example.)

Certainly from your list "Better controls for deleting entire pages" and "Improving image cropping options" are high on my list!

I always found page deletion a little odd, as you do ask if the user is sure before deleting, it always seemed a bit weird they have to go in and delete each region before they can finally delete the page!

As far as cropping goes, i made a custom field aaaages back which was a little clunky, but added an actual image cropping script, so the user could drag the focus about and get a mini preview of the result. That broke once assets were added to perch though. I have been considering recently making a new version using this: https://fengyuanchen.github.io/cropper/

Finally in Perch Runway, a way to have master pages that aren't available to everyone would be great! (unless i'm being thick and not realizing that's already a thing! It's quite possible!)

So for example, i have a homepage master page, an xml sitemap master page, a contact form master page, all of which i'd really rather the site owner couldn't choose when adding a new page. I went into Master Pages, half expecting it to be an option when i clicked into one (like a check box list "Only show this master page to:") but alas, no such luck!

Drew McLellan

Drew McLellan 2638 points
Perch Support

@Daniel, in Runway go to Page Options and there's a "Subpages may use these master pages" checkbox list.

Hi Drew, Sorry i should have mentioned that i meant specifically Top Level pages.

It's been a while since I've been Perching - been stuck in WordPress for months. Page deletion would be high on my list, as well end dates for the events app.

An extra SPAM trap option on forms would be great, you know the "5 + 4=" type.

Hi Drew

I would like to see fixes/tweaks for:

  • Fixed Assets slide out sidebar. Scrolling doesn't work on a large screen in Safari or Chrome in thumbnail mode. I have a 27" screen. It only shows the first page of images. If you refresh the page with a much smaller window the scrolling UI kicks back in.

  • Folding block content so you can reorder blocks that exceed the height of the browser window. In fact folding for repeaters would also be handy.

  • Close assets / log out use the same button. I've had a few clients complain about this. They find it confusing.

  • Counting tag and perhaps simple maths to help iterate through results with more control

  • Markdown formatting. I know we can change this in the JS file but it be helpful if the default heading input from the Markdown toolbar was consistently #, ##, ###. rather than the, in my opinion, messy -------- for h1 and ===== for h2 and then a switch to ### for h3. Clients take to markdown relatively easily but this tiny point has been a source of confusion for them.

That's about all I can think of for now! Thanks for the excellent product!

Jon

Would be great to sort the bug where there is no thumbnail preview image if you delete an asset and then re-upload the asset with the same name...I find this happening quite a lot when altering sizes of images etc in development. At the moment you have to change the name of the image before uploading again.

This is mostly UI stuff, but it's been coming up a lot lately so this seems like the place to mention it:

  • Batch delete for items in a region. Or, at the very least, a responsive delete function—i.e., when you click "yes" in the popup confirmation, the item should immediately be deleted and disappear from the list.
  • Ability to display related items in the editing list. Right now I can see and add the related fields to the comma-separated list in the "Options" pane, but all that shows up is a dash for each item.
  • Generating new sizes from existing images when templates are updated and re-saved (or republished), instead of only generating sizes when the asset is first uploaded. Although, come to think of it, I don't see people asking or posting about it here so maybe this is already a feature?

Runway-specific

  • Ability for editors to filter the collection editing list by a given field (or category, or relation, etc)
  • Option to limit search to a single collection, instead of searching the whole site
  • Lower priority: Ability to customize pagination of the collection edition lists. It's great to be able to sort by so many fields, but it's also easy to get lost in the pages when changing the sort. An ability to see everything on a single page would be kind of nice, especially for fans of ctrl-F.

Can you tell our collections are getting kind of huge? :)

Something that only hit me this evening....

A way to make the Title column of the page listing less wide would be nice. I have some page titles that are pretty damn long, yet the wasted space between the end of them and the Regions column is pretty huge!

It would mean more space for your regions (if you have a lot)...

But i also wonder if the list view could have some more (optional?) columns that would help the user. So published date, maybe a column (or two!) that could be assigned by the site builder. So say you want to have "featured" articles, if you had a column you could assign a value to, it would make featured articles way easier to identify by the admin (without having to go into every page!) and therefore manage.

Basically, a little more control over the columns ad their content in the admin page list views would be nice :^)

Drew McLellan

Drew McLellan 2638 points
Perch Support

Jon:

Close assets / log out use the same button. I've had a few clients complain about this. They find it confusing.

It's not the same button. You close the assets chooser by clicking on the arrow or anywhere else on the edit form. We made the log out button also close assets just in case the user gets confused and logs themselves out.

Abby Larsen

Abby Larsen 0 points
Registered Developer

Oh, geez... just saw this "We're not particularly looking for feedback on add-ons at the moment (feel free to post those to a new thread, of course) but we'd be interested in knowing your needs for both core Perch and Perch Runway."

I totally misread this previously as the opposite! I've moved my posts to Add-On forum! Apologies!

The ability minimise blocks/repeaters - after just a handful of either the admin screen can become quite unruly!

Abby Larsen

Abby Larsen 0 points
Registered Developer

Haydn Ward said:

The ability minimise blocks/repeaters - after just a handful of either the admin screen can become quite unruly!

I second this! I was thinking this just this morning.

I'd love to be able create folders for regions in the page section of the admin. For sites that have a lot of regions (like multi-lingual sites), it would help in terms of readability. Based on roles, one could decide how to group the regions to make the edit for clients easier.

In case of multi-lingual sites for instance, instead of having a list of regions.

  • Title - fr
  • Title - en
  • Form - fr
  • Form - en
  • Description - fr
  • Description - en

I could organise the regions so that I have a list of folders holding a given number of regions:

  • Title
    • Title - fr
    • Title - en
  • Form
    • Form - fr
    • Form - en
  • Description
    • Description - fr
    • Description - en
  • Option to include apps in main menu rather than in 'app menu'
  • Option to rename app menu
  • Option to go straight to edit screen if page only has one region

Hi Drew,

Alphabetical ordering of .html templates would be great, regardless of any _ used or otherwise folder structure.

Toby Martin said:

  • Option to include apps in main menu rather than in 'app menu'

I would also like to be able to do this, mainly because of the Blog app. It could be something simple as specifying an $apps_menu array variable in the config/apps.php file.

A standard api to add assets in editors would be great and having, at least, the markitup implementation would help.

Dan Andersen said:

Adding an option to allow editors to delete items from assets.

I'd like something this too. I appreciate that the present setup prevents users from accidentally deleting assets that are in use on the site. So perhaps users could send assets to a bin from which they disappear as part of cleanup. So users then could tidy up their assets but not risk deleting anything that's being used.