Gantry Framework beta for Joomla 1.6 Released

We are pleased to announce the release our first beta of the Gantry Framework for Joomla 1.6. This was a major update and large portions of the admin were re-written to be more usable and also to better integrate with the Joomla 1.6 API. Please download and test this version with your Joomla 1.6 installations and let us know any issues or bugs that you find. You can participate in conversations with the developers via our new Google Groups-based mailing lists.

Download: Gantry v3.2beta1 for Joomla 1.6

There has been some fairly radical changes required to adhere to the new Joomla 1.6 API, and some creative problem solving to get around issues we ran across during development. The most obvious change you will notice when you install and start using this version is the new look and feel of the template parameters. We are using the new 'tab' approach we introduced with Gantry for WordPress. This will be our go-forward UI layout and will also make it's way to Gantry for Joomla 1.5 in the coming months. This new layout is much more manageable and user-friendly. Also this version of Gantry integrates with the Joomla 1.6 'style's functionality and follows that paradigm very closely but also has some extra functionality like inheritance. This version of styles replaces the "per-menu-item" configuration used in the Joomla 1.5 version. There have been many performance and usability optimizations in this version, and we think it's our best version yet!

Next Steps

So what's next? We have to still convert RokMiniEvents and there is some final installer and validation testing needed on the rest of our 'first-round' of extension conversions. We plan to release these next week along with our first Joomla 1.6 template "Tachyon". After Tachyon is released, we'll start cranking out the other Gantry templates working backwards from most recent to the older ones. Of course we'll have to take into account the development of our upcoming "March" template but that's progressing nicely also.

Screenshots

Successful installation of the Gantry Bundle

Gantry "Master" style showing up in the Joomla Template Styles Manger

Gantry Overview showing of new Tab UI

The Gantry Styles Tab

New an optimized Gantry Layouts Tab

Gantry Mobile Tab supporting iPhone and Android

Improved Gantry Assignments Tab for assigning styles to menu items.

Slide-down Presets panel and badges showing Preset modified attributes

Known Issues

• Count of modules + features has intermitent problem causing module positions not to collapse in certain configurations
• Automatic cache-cleaning on all administrative actions not 100% implemented

Download

Get Joomla 1.6 Gantry v3.2beta1