Perch templating using third party data

I’ve just finished integrating a third party real estate CRM on a client project. The CRM stores all of the properties and property info and they provide an api to pull in the data needed to generate the property listings and detail pages.

The site is built using Perch Runway as the CMS and prior to the CRM integration I was using Collections to store and display the properties. Switch to calling the data from the api and render templates on the fly using an array of data? Hello, perch_template!

I needed to grab the data via the api, store it appropriately in an array and then pass it to my template using perch_template. And because I already had a set of Perch templates for showing the listing and detail views (from the Collection), I was able to re-use them with only minor edits.

I don’t really have any code examples here or anything practical to share (I would recommend this post as required reading for that), but I can certainly speak to the ease and benefits of using Perch templating in this way.