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Webpage Development Mode

Hi all,

Does anyone know of a way that I could modify Perch to show a checkbox next to each page that I could check when undergoing development on that page? Ideally, I would like to implement this on all pages so that when that part of the website is undergoing development, website visitors would be redirected to a page that says "That page is undergoing maintenance at the moment"...

Any suggestions greatly appreciated.
Conor Harkins

Conor Harkins 0 points

  • 3 years ago
Hussein Al Hammad

Hussein Al Hammad 105 points
Registered Developer

3 years ago

Hello Conor,

If the page has never been live, it's probably better you don't publish it until you've completed development in a local environment.

Anyway, a possible solution for this would be to use page attributes. The following adds a checkbox to the Details tab of the page in the control panel.

templates/pages/attributes/default.html:

<perch:template path="seo" />
<perch:template path="dev" />

templates/pages/attributes/dev.html:

<perch:pages id="dev_mode" type="checkbox" label="Development Mode" suppress="true" divider-before="Development"/>

page.php:

$dev_mode = perch_page_attribute('dev_mode', [
    'template' => 'dev.html'
], true);

if($dev_mode) {
    PerchSystem::redirect('https://example.com/');
}
Conor Harkins

Conor Harkins 0 points

3 years ago

Thanks Hussein! I’ll try that tonight.
Conor Harkins

Conor Harkins 0 points

3 years ago

Hussein... your solution... it just works...

It's brilliant, thank you!
Robert Ketter

Robert Ketter 103 points

3 years ago

Conor Harkins said:

Hussein... your solution... it just works...

It's brilliant, thank you!

Yes Hussein, your reply inspires a few thought for me, and I think that’s a good solution you suggest.

While I do no live development since I have a dev setup on my local machine, your response could be used to limit access while under live development.
Conor Harkins

Conor Harkins 0 points

3 years ago

I added the final piece of code to the Perch runtime - is this ok? Or will this get overwritten in an update?

It just means that I don't have to go through every single page and add the snippet.

The only problem I am now faced with is that I, myself, cannot see the page :') So I have no idea what it looks like while I am developing it - this may take more thought - as you were.
Hussein Al Hammad

Hussein Al Hammad 105 points
Registered Developer

3 years ago

Oh right! I believe you can check whether you are logged into Perch as Drew mentions here.

So combine that with what we have:

$Users = new PerchUsers;
$CurrentUser = $Users->get_current_user();

if($dev_mode && (!is_object($CurrentUser) || !$CurrentUser->logged_in())) {
    PerchSystem::redirect('https://example.com/');
}
Rachel Andrew

Rachel Andrew 394 points
Perch Support

3 years ago

Please do not change core Perch code. If you do so we can no longer offer support.

Runway includes a site behind login mode as a feature that allows you to put the site in development so it can only be seen by people logged in with an admin account.
Conor Harkins

Conor Harkins 0 points

3 years ago

Please do not change core Perch code. If you do so we can no longer offer support.

Hi Rachel. I am not changing the core code, it would only be the runtime inside perch (not core) - does this still count? I noticed this file was only including the core runtime code so thought this would be ok.

And thanks again, Hussein.
Drew McLellan

Drew McLellan 2638 points
Perch Support

3 years ago

If you want to add code into the runtime chain then you can do it with an app.