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You’ve downloaded and installed Perch so now you can get started editing content. The following steps are all you need to do to begin editing simple content on your pages.
Step 1: Linking Perch into your page
The first thing you must do is link Perch into your page so that it can serve up the content. This is done by adding a simple PHP statement at the top of each page.
<?php include('perch/runtime.php'); ?>This statement includes a path from the page to the Perch runtime file. Just like a path to an image in HTML, this needs to be adjusted depending on where the page lives in your site.
For example, if the page in question is /about/history.php the path would need to be adjusted to move up out of the about folder like so:
<?php include('../perch/runtime.php'); ?>Step 2: Adding the content tags
Once Perch is linked in, you need to add tags to identify where the editable content should go. A Perch tag is very simple:
<?php perch_content('Main heading'); ?>These can go anywhere in your page. The value inside the quotes uniquely identifies that piece of content in the page, so you should change this to match the purpose of the content. You should use only letters, numbers, spaces and underscores. All the rest of the configuration is done inside Perch.
Once you have added one or more tags to a page, refresh the page in your browser (checking that no errors are displayed), and then log into Perch to begin editing content. Unless you changed the install location of Perch you login at /perch – if your domain was http://www.example.com you login at http://www.example.com/perch.
Step 3: Initializing new Content regions
Once logged in you should see a list of pages on your site and the tags they contain. The value under Region is the name you gave the content when adding the tag to your page. The first thing you need to do is to tell Perch what template to use for each of the tags you have added. Until you have done this they will show up as ‘NEW’ in the list.
Click the region name for the content you wish to work with. The next screen will ask you to select a template. Unless you have created some templates of your own the listed templates are the default templates installed with Perch. You can read more about these templates. In the screenshot below I am selecting to make this content a ‘text block’.
The only other thing you need to set when initializing a region, is to decide whether multiple items should be allowed, if so check the checkbox then click submit.
Step 4: Editing your content
The page will reload with an edit form which takes its field or fields from the template you chose in the previous step. You can now edit the content. The next time you or your client come to edit this content you will just see the edit page as the template has now been set.
After editing your content reload the page on your site (where you added the tags earlier) to see your content display.
If you View Source on this page you can see that the Perch tags have been completely replaced by the content.
My Content region used a text block and was set to use Textile so it has been correctly wrapped with paragraph tags. The heading I set as text, so it goes into the template just as a string of text. You can specify exactly how each template behaves by editing and creating your own templates.