June: What I've been working on

A short post about recent work.

Perch and more Perch

I have been working on a couple of new Perch CMS projects. The first of these is to duplicate an existing site on a new domain. And “re-skin” it to match a second brand. It’s for a company which has two brands although they sell the same things. Not quite sure about this approach in a business sense but that’s for the company to decide. I suppose the second site might be viewed as microsite of the first. It is a slightly smaller site.

Anyway, it’s been relatively straightforward so far. I have access to the first site and the developer of that has sent me all relevant files. I have completed the initial phase of the work and the site is ready for some design changes now. I’m waiting on client feedback before I start on that.

The second project was to upgrade a Perch 2.7 site to Perch 2.8.34. This has not been without its problems. The site was displaying PHP errors on the Perch login screen caused by a hosting upgrade to PHP 7. So, we made the decision to upgrade to Perch 2.8.34 which solves this issue.

My local site upgrade was completed very smoothly. However, the live site upgrade was only part completed. The main problem is that, after upgrade, I’m kicked out of Perch admin immedately after a login attempt. I’m sure this is a web hosting problem with PHP sessions on the hosting company server although sessions are written and stored in the appropriate location. The front end of the site is absolutely fine but Perch login isn’t possible.

I have seen this problem before and the solution there was to upgrade the site to Perch 3. However, that’s more work and I will need to set-up a staging site on a sub-domain to mimic the live site as close as possible. If the client agrees to the extra work, I will do that.

WordPress

I’ve almost finished a retheme of a WordPress site and I’ve “rescued” another WP site where the domain name was mis-configured. The latter site was also running a very old version, WP 4.0.2, which is about three years old. Yikes! However, it’s a simple site with few plugins and I upgraded it with only a single “white screen of death”. That was caused by an old plugin but I restored my site back-up and repeated the upgrade in a different sequence. The client now has a “new” site.

Writing

• I’ve posted about a pet peeve of mine, Tell People Your Address
• There have been two issues of the Perchology newsletter in June.

Reading

WordPress Plugins, Who Needs Them compares Perch with the WordPress plugin ecosystem. It’s a good read although I think it oversimplifies some things and doesn’t take website budgets into account.

Big news about Perch 4 recently: Perch is Ten! Find out what comes next. A new licensing model is one of the changes.

I’ve been reading up on Tailwind CSS partly because it’s espoused by more and more people (it seems). Also, I have some bespoke website build projects in the pipeline and I want to compare systems. I have used Foundation 6 and “my” light CSS library over the last year but I’m wondering if something else may be better. Tailwind is certainly different but I’ve not come to a conclusion yet

That’s all for the moment. See you soon.