Whenever the topic of Joomla template frameworks comes up, the big names get bandied around, along with a few less well-known solutions. Inevitably, Gantry is mentioned, and usually in disparaging tones along with adjectives such as "heavy", "bloated", and "slow.” I think this generally stems from a lack of education and understanding about what Gantry brings to the table, how it performs tasks, and how to get the best out of it.

This guide is a revised edition of the previous Tools: Firebug blog entry from February 2009. In essence, this guide is a brief overview of the tools for self help, providing you with the abilities to debug your own issues and identify what and how to customize in the same manner as the RocketTheme Team. Most styling issues, whether bugs or customization requests, are typically very easy to address yourself.

This guide outlines how to inspect, debug, amend and customize using LESS.

Watchful is a relatively new service that focuses on providing a unified dashboard that allows backups, updating, monitoring, and other services for multiple Joomla installations. This service has been created by a joint venture between Anything Digital who are also the authors of sh404SEF,and inetis, a Swiss-based Joomla consultancy company. We here at RocketTheme have been testing Watchful in an effort to make our demo server more manageable, and I wanted to take the opportunity to relay our findings and thoughts.

What an exciting day it has been! It seems that last night there was a widespread update for Redhat/Centos operating systems that run the webservers of many web hosting providers. This update included a version of the libxml2 library that is used by PHP when utilizing XML. This updated version of libxml2 seems to be causing widespread problems for existing PHP frameworks, projects and code that make use of those XML features. One of these is our own RokCommon library that is used by RokGallery and RokSprocket for both Joomla and WordPress. We make use of a static method called DOMDocument::schemavalidate() which seems to have broken with this last update, so please read more for a quick fix...

We originally developed RokTwittie in May of 2009 when Twitter was in full swing. It was created as a very configurable and highly customizable Joomla module with many advanced features. We wrote an in-depth blog post on some of its capabilities and over the years RokTwittie has become the staple of many a Joomla and WordPress site. Unfortunately Twitter is making changes that mean we can no longer effectively develop this extension.

As we reflect on the past 12 months, we are really proud of what we achieved in 2012. We moved from fixed layouts to more modern responsive web layouts, we started developing Joomla templates and the vast majority of our existing extensions to support Joomla 3.0. We also created and refined our ground-breaking RokSprocket extension that is now available for Joomla 2.5 and 3.0 as well as WordPress. We also have started converting some of our previously released Joomla 2.5 templates to Joomla 3.0. To help enable this we had a major update to our Gantry framework. The new 4.0 version has a new back-end design, speed and performance optimizations, support for responsive layouts, and a brand new default front-end template based on Twitter Bootstrap. We continue to translate these advances we make on our Joomla products to WordPress and of course phpBB.

So what's coming in 2013?

We are really excited about this coming year and we have several big things planned. We are going to continue to create great new templates, themes, and extensions for all our platforms, so let's break the details down into several key areas for easier digestion:

We are proud to release this latest set of free seasonal icons. This Christmas set by RocketTheme is free for use with personal and commercial projects with attribution and released under the Creative Commons 3.0 license. We have worked with our friends at Smashing Magazine to create and release this icon set containing ten icons available as 256×256px PNGs that have been lovingly prepared for Smashing Magazine and the Web design community.

People know me as a bit of a mac freak. Specifically I am addicted to apps that make my life easier and more efficient. I am especially drawn to good-looking apps that are powerful and fast. I am always amazed when I talk to my friends and family that they don't know about a certain application that would make their life easier, so I have put together a list of the 61 apps that I am currently running and little summary of what they do and why they are so great.

We hope you enjoy this new free mini-pack of halloween icons. This spooky set by RocketTheme is free for use with personal and commercial projects with attribution and released under the Creative Commons 3.0 license. These highly-detailed icons come in 5 sizes, each hand-edited to ensure details are size-appropriate and each pixel is perfectly placed. Each icon comes in 48x48, 64x64, 128x128, 256x256, and 300x300 pixels in transparent PNG format.

We are proud to release a new free icon pack. This Web-centric set by RocketTheme is free for use with personal and commercial projects with attribution and released under the Creative Commons 3.0 license. These highly-detailed icons come in 6 standard sizes, each hand-edited to ensure the utmost quality for each size. Each icon comes in 16x16, 32x32, 48x48, 64x64, 128x128, and 256x256 pixels in transparent PNG format.