Joomla 1.5 introduced a standard JavaScript library in the form of MooTools 1.11. Over its lifetime Joomla has first upgraded to MooTools 1.12 and more recently with the advent of Joomla 1.5.19 provided support via a mootools 'upgrade' plugin, to enable MooTools 1.2. MooTools 1.12 is now based on a 6 year old JavaScript framework, and since its inception, MooTools has continually evolved, the API has been updated, optimizations have been made, and new features added.

With the introduction of Joomla 1.5.19 and specifically MooTools 1.2 support, Joomla extension developers now have the potential to write cleaner and faster JavaScript code, however this came at the expense of backwards compatibility with MooTools 1.12. The improvements and changes to the API made in version 1.2 were major enough that they effectively broke with the API used by 1.12. In an attempt to alleviate this issue there have been a couple of compatibility layers that work in conjunction with MooTools 1.2 in order to allow older, 1.12 format scripts to run. However neither of these are 100% successful, and it's not a good long-term strategy to rely on these crutches for your JavaScript. You are much better served if you rewrite your JavaScript to function 100% with the new 1.2 compatible syntax. Taking this step will produce faster more efficient JavaScript and will also future-proof you with regard to future versions of MooTools such as the recently released MooTools 1.3.

For quite a while now CSS3 and HTML5 have been the popular buzz words of web design. The promise of new features and functionality is enticing to developers and end users alike. Unfortunately, the big holdup has been lack of consistent browser support. A new dawn is emerging, however, as modern browsers have rapidly been adopting these future web standards.

Over the past several months, RocketTheme has been introducing CSS3 elements into our template releases to take advantage of the cleaner code and new functionalities that it provides. I wanted to take some time in this post to go into more detail about what CSS3 elements we have been using, what browsers support them, and how we plan to take advantage of these web specs in future projects.

As we develop more and more powerful framework and extensions we are continually running into situations where we are sacrificing speed and functionality due to the requirement of supporting PHP 4. Version 4.0 was released May 22, 2000, it is no longer updated and even the last security update of 4.4.9 was released in August of 2008. PHP 5 was released in 2004 and the two branches that are currently supported are the 5.2 and the 5.3 branch. We are looking to get a 'user' perspective on the current usage of PHP 4 and 5, we would really appreciate it if you could take 2 minutes to fill out this short survey:

After several months of development, we are very pleased to announce the launch of our new Gantry Framework site located at http://www.gantry-framework.org. This site provides a lot of documentation, screencasts, and other great information to help showcase what Gantry can do and how to use it. As well as launching the site, we are also releasing the stand-alone Gantry template that can be used as a good base template for any template development. Also, there is a RocketLauncher version to get you started as fast as possible.

With this months template we are rolling out the next major version of our Gantry framework, Gantry 2.5. All along we have really tried to make Gantry be as template neutral and as flexible as possible for any of our own templates, or any custom templates you develop with it. With Gantry 2.5 we are trying to make it very easy to upgrade Gantry itself without touching the template. We are also providing even more power to your gantry template installs with some enhanced control of how you apply template stylings to your Menu Items. There are even some expanded advanced levels of overrides for those of you developing your own templates based on Gantry.

This latest post will provide some more details on the great features we’ve added to Gantry version 2.0. First of all, from the very start, we’ve endeavored to make Gantry as backwards-compatible, and as easy to upgrade as possible. What this means for the Reaction template, is that you can actually drop the entire Gantry 2.0 lib/ folder into your Gantry 1.0 version of Reaction, and it will just work in the same way it did before. However to take advantage of the 2.0 features you will need to update your templateDetails.xml file. We’ll be providing easy step-by-step instructions as well as a 2.0 version of Reaction when we’ve got 2.0 ready to go. All to-be-released templates from this point on will be based on 2.0.

So what’s in 2.0? Well the previous blog post provided a quick feature list of what we’re adding, but there are some really cool core features that I want to expand on.

With the release of the Reaction Joomla template, Gantry has seen the light of day and the response has been overwhelming. The Gantry Framework that underpins Reaction has enabled an unprecedented level of flexibility and customization that has exceeded our own goals and intentions. From the forums we have noted some useful features and we've added these to our list of additions and modification we already had slated for version 2.0 of Gantry.

In part 3 of this series of blog posts on Gantry we're going to delve into the how the body area of the template is controlled, and also how the power of Gantry Features allows you to add advanced functionality that fits into your customized layout with very little headache.

A few days ago I blogged about what we wanted Gantry to be, in this post I'm going to delve into how Gantry looks and works. Gantry involves a bit of a paradigm shift when it comes to thinking about how a template works and is configured. We've tried to make this as simple as possible while still allowing the most flexibility so I'm going go over it from front to back.

This is Part 1 in a series of blog posts to provide some insight into the origins of Gantry and the functionality it provides. To learn more about the Gantry Framework as well as view documentation and tutorials, be sure to visit the official Gantry Framework site.

A framework is a set of functionality that provides some structure and logic to support a rapid and simplified development process. Joomla! is built on top of the Joomla Framework that abstracts some core functionality into a reusable set of code that allows a fairly easy development process to create new, or extend existing functionality. The Joomla! framework is what I would refer to as a PHP-based web framework. Depending on the problem your trying to solve, there is probably a framework out there to suit your needs.