Perch 2.5 now available

The big thing in Perch 2.5 is the new Assets app. This is a core app that helps you manage and reuse assets (images, files) around your site. It should be an end to uploading the same thing multiple times. Hurrah!

As ever, this is the first version of the functionality. We think it's useful and works well, but we also have plans to develop it further. So don't worry if your most hoped-for asset-related desire isn't included yet. Post a suggestion on the forum and we'll make sure we're aware of it.

Some things I like about 2.5:

If you have ImageMagick on your server, we can produce thumbnails of things like PDF files and videos. It looks really impressive once it's all set up - I bet clients will love it. More here

We worked really hard on the concept for how assets should be chosen for reuse. We didn't want to produce a nasty bolt-on 1990s file browser interface like CKFinder - we wanted it to feel like part of the same product. I think the side-out asset chooser does a good job at that. Again, this is just the first iteration, and we plan to make the asset chooser much more powerful over time.

Just about everywhere you can use images and files in Perch now has the asset chooser. The notable exception is Gallery, which uses its own image handling for obvious reasons. The next job on my list is to update Gallery to integrate it with Assets better.

The move to PHP 5.3 means we've been able to update things like Markdown and Textile to more modern, efficient parsers, but we're also able to make loads of optimisations within Perch itself. Those haven't all happened immediately in Perch 2.5, but there are lots of new optimisations in there and more to come.

The full update notes are here: https://grabaperch.com/update/v2-5

Thanks goes to our Registered Developers for their feedback during the beta phase.