Growing from Perch ... to Runway Collections

Hopefully you'll like this example of how Perch (and then Runway) can grow to accommodate unforeseen growth in a website. We've just completed this work, so while its fresh in my mind I decided to add a description here in case it helps someone in this Perch community ...

My customer is a charity, supporting local voluntary organisations and community groups.

Starting with a simple text block ...

On part of their website, they initially started with a list of membership organisations that were being displayed on a page. Each organisation had an optional website link. There were only a handful of organisations, so this was all managed in a simple text block, manually adding the links with the text block editor buttons.

Moving to a multiple item region ...

Then the list started growing. As my customer added and removed organisations they started getting in a mess, not removing the website links properly. So we changed the way it worked and set up a multiple item region of two fields - one for the organisation name and another for the optional website link. We could then better control the editing for my customer. At this time, they were still a Perch user.

But the list continued to grow and had by now reached over 200 organisations and links. By this time, there were also really 3 lists (one for each of three districts). Not only were the lists longer to display, and the multiple item region getting larger, the lists were of course trickier for the website visitor to navigate around too.

Switching to a Runway Collection ...

So, we converted the site to Runway, and the multiple item region to a Perch Runway Collection. We put a select box for 'District' into the collection. The customer could then add a new organisation, an optional website link and designate which district it was in. We could then display the 3 lists on the website using the 'perch_collection' statement and filtering by the district name. Those pages are still in use on the website now.

Adding searching ...

But the list continued to grow. Its now around 370 organisations as I write this. So, we discussed new plans with the customer and added checkboxes to the collection. One checkbox for each type of organisation, and the customer spent several days editing the collection to designate which type(s) each organisation fitted into. That's just been finished, so we've now implemented searching of the organisation types, making life much easier for my customer and the website visitor.

You can see this in action at https://www.hamsva.org.uk/members-list