Gantry Framework - Part 4: v2.0 Going GPL

Written by Andy Miller Thursday, 10 December 2009 00:00

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.

This is Part 4 in a series of blog posts on the new RocketTheme Gantry Joomla Template Framework. If you have not already done so, you may find Part 1, Part 2, and Part 3 helpful in understanding this post.

While attending the Joomla Developer's Conference in New York this past weekend, we gave a quick 'lightening talk' on the Gantry Framework that consisted of some quick illustrations of its capabilities. We also made the informal announcement that we had decided to release Gantry as a 100% GPL project. Originally Gantry started life as a way for our own team to create quality, feature-rich Joomla templates, faster and cleaner, while allowing the end-user more power in customization. As we were building Gantry, and then in turn, as we were building Reaction on Gantry, we realized that every template developer would benefit from Gantry. As we started to post some blogs about what Gantry was we started to receive enquiries from template developers about the availability of Gantry for projects they were working on. After careful consideration we have decided that we will release this core Gantry template and framework freely as a 100% GPL project. This means that you will soon be able to download and build on Gantry just as we build our own RocketTheme Joomla templates. You will have access to all the great features that come bundled in Gantry just as we do.

Version 2.0

The plan is to make Gantry publicly available around the release of the 2.0 version. We have some great features that we ran out of time for in releasing 1.0, but here is a summary of what we hope to get into version 2.0. This list is not fixed, and some items may get bumped to 3.0, and others added to 2.0, but it's our working list at this time:

• Built-in CSS style & JavaScript compression system
• phpDoc Gantry classes for better documentation
• More configuration options in regard to feature ordering
• Support for 'per-menu' layout configuration
• Support for saving parameters as presets
• 960 Grid - 16 column support
• Cleanup in Joomla overrides
• Speed optimizations in the Positions parameter element
• Awesome RTL support
• Feature toggle to disable ?tp=1 support on production sites
• General speed and caching optimizations

With the public release, we will be setting up a new Gantry framework site, with documentation, tutorials, code samples, etc. We will also be setting up forums specific to Gantry implementation, development and modification available to RocketTheme members only. If you want access to these you will need to join one of our template/theme/style clubs.

NOTE: I updated the list of features to remove the copyright one (we decided this was not worth it), and also we've put in much more extensive RTL support than we first planned.