Forum

Thread tagged as: Question

Runway or Standard Perch

I have read through the site, and browsed a through a lot of the documentation here and I am still unsure what factors are involved in choosing Perch Runway over standard Perch.

Could someone please help explain this to me a little better.

Admittedly my understanding is limited as I am a front end developer, with a little experience with PHP.

Tony Astley

Tony Astley 0 points

  • 4 years ago
Drew McLellan

Drew McLellan 2638 points
Perch Support

Does this help? https://grabaperch.com/buy/features

If not, perhaps explain what the requirements of your project are and we can help.

Thanks Drew, The feature set seems very close, I guess I need a better understanding of the benefits of the front end controller?

In a nutshell I'm looking to see if standard Perch would meet the requirements of the current projects I have in the works. Have tried Perch previously very briefly, and was unsure if it was my configuration or the limitations of the system.

My biggest query was it's handling of template updates, when I gave it a try a few months agoI struggled to get template changes to show on previously built pages using the standard Perch system.

If a site has been built using standard Perch, could the set of templates be modified, and changes reflected in the existing pages on the site?

Thanks in advance.

Duncan Revell

Duncan Revell 78 points
Registered Developer

If you make changes to a template that is already in use, you need to go to the region that uses that template and hit the save button again.

If you need to do this for multiple pages at once, there is a "republish" button that does this for all pages.

Drew McLellan

Drew McLellan 2638 points
Perch Support

I guess I need a better understanding of the benefits of the front end controller?

There are two big advantages.

One is not needing to have a file on disk for every page in your site. Instead, pages are a record in the database plus a master page template. That makes it easy to modify and move pages, to update templates, to backup and restore and so on.

The other advantage is flexibility in creating URLs. Because there's no file in the site structure, you can design nice clean URLs to work the way you want them - all managed within Runway without needing to create complex server rewrite rules for everything.

Other big advantages of Runway include automatic scheduled backups, cloud storage and big repositories of content we call Collections.