Dropping Gantry 5
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- Richard Parks
- Sr. Rocketeer
- Posts: 100
- Thanks: 3
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After hours of wasted time trying to figure out this silly system I am dropping it completely. I am not sure how Rockettheme intends to proceed from here but if it is with gantry 5 completely in place then they are going to lose customers hand over fist. It is simply not easy enough or stable enougth to use in any setting.
This system has not simplified the development process but has rather made it far more complicated. I wish them all the best as they move forward but It won't be with me as a customer as obviously they have forgotten that nontechnical people develop websites too and we have always enjoyed the level of ease that rockettheme has provided - unfortunately that ease is now gone.
A very frustrated and annoyed rockettheme customer (over 5 years)
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- Canberra Web
- Newbie
- Posts: 12
- Thanks: 9
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I am afraid I have to agree.
I have been building Joomla sites for 10+ years and this system makes it much slower for me to build templates and websites.
I really liked Gantry 4 but Gantry 5 is terrible.
It's just very time consuming to do anything. Each process is long winded.
Adding a new section should just be a click of a button like adding a new row within a section, rather than having to edit the YAML files.
I think because they have tried to make it CMS agnostic, so they can use it for their wordpress themes, it is not designed with the core functionality of Joomla in mind and so actually makes it slower to use.
It should be a template framework not a mini CMS in itself. You don't even have to use Joomla at all and consequently lose a lot of the funtionality of Joomla.
There is far too much scrolling. For example, say I want to add a module instance particle to the footer section of a really long page I have made, I have to scroll right up to the top left and then drag it slowly down while the page scrolls slowly down itself and then drop it in that space. This is multiplied when I want to have 4 module instances at 25% for example and have to do this each time. What a joke. It would have been much easier in gantry 4, click 4 to make that area 25% and then use module positions a b c d, done!
I can see what they were trying to do and over time if they consider native Joomla funtionality and improve it it could be good but for me I am going back to Gantry 4 or better still the t3 framework developed specifically for Joomla. -
The following users have thanked you: Debbie Corbin, TownHall
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- Kat05
- Preeminent Rocketeer
- Posts: 25898
- Thanks: 334
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Richard Parks wrote:
After hours of wasted time trying to figure out this silly system I am dropping it completely. I am not sure how Rockettheme intends to proceed from here but if it is with gantry 5 completely in place then they are going to lose customers hand over fist. It is simply not easy enough or stable enougth to use in any setting.hi richard,
This system has not simplified the development process but has rather made it far more complicated. I wish them all the best as they move forward but It won't be with me as a customer as obviously they have forgotten that nontechnical people develop websites too and we have always enjoyed the level of ease that rockettheme has provided - unfortunately that ease is now gone.
A very frustrated and annoyed rockettheme customer (over 5 years)
thank you for your post, we always appreciate any feedback from our members, that includes constructive criticism too.
of course we would like to address any concerns that you may have regarding our new gantry 5 framework and answer any questions.
i read your post a couple of times, however i can't really pinpoint a particular issue that you may have to give you any detailed advice. i am also not seeing any previous posts from you here in our forum and not on our gitter chat gitter.im/gantry/gantry5 which is entirely dedicated to gantry 5 and any questions/suggestions that rockettheme members or non-members may have. everyone is welcome to join and we almost have 300 users there at this point. our development team is driven to hear from you and a lot of requests that have been posted on github github.com/gantry/gantry5 since the release of gantry 5 beta have been addressed by our team in the meantime. we strive to continue to improve gantry 5 and any suggestions are welcome.
kat
- Kat05 / QA Lead & Support / Germany
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- Kat05
- Preeminent Rocketeer
- Posts: 25898
- Thanks: 334
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hi canberra web,
thank you as well for your post.
Canberra Web wrote:There is far too much scrolling. For example, say I want to add a module instance particle to the footer section of a really long page I have made, I have to scroll right up to the top left and then drag it slowly down while the page scrolls slowly down itself and then drop it in that space. This is multiplied when I want to have 4 module instances at 25% for example and have to do this each time. What a joke. It would have been much easier in gantry 4, click 4 to make that area 25% and then use module positions a b c d, done!i believe you are using rc3 of gantry? there have been significant changes to the layout manager in the past few weeks and these changes are available in the latest ci build gantry.org/downloads#ci-builds and will also be available in gantry 5.0.0 stable. the area on the left is now fixed on the page, you no longer have to scroll down all the way when dragging a new particle, you can scroll down to the footer section first, then simply drag and drop the new particle from the left to the right. what you described just took me 5 seconds to accomplish, can't get any faster than that and this improvement is a result of feedback we have received from our community.
Canberra Web wrote:I think because they have tried to make it CMS agnostic, so they can use it for their wordpress themes, it is not designed with the core functionality of Joomla in mind and so actually makes it slower to use.i am not aware of any joomla core functionality that we have taken away in gantry 5?
It should be a template framework not a mini CMS in itself. You don't even have to use Joomla at all and consequently lose a lot of the funtionality of Joomla.
kat
- Kat05 / QA Lead & Support / Germany
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- Richard Parks
- Sr. Rocketeer
- Posts: 100
- Thanks: 3
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Hi Kat
You will see that I have made many posting in the rockettheme forum over the years. I have never had an issue with gantry until version 5.
My biggest issue is that simple things like placing a custom module on one page makes no sense to me at all. I have tried watching the videos and I can't seem to get it.
It seems to me that with gantry 5 a 2 step process now takes 5 or 6 steps. Its frustrating. it is also impoissble for me to hand this site over to a novice and expect them to be able to do anything with it.
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- Dan221
- Jr. Rocketeer
- Posts: 31
- Thanks: 1
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I tried gantry5 and had to drop it also. Its a Mini-Joomla with Particles instead of modules and particles instead of plugins and more stuff like this, - and if you have not only a few module-positions, its not to handle with all that scrolling. As I work since Joomla 1.5 with Joomla and teach people in courses to use Joomla3, I find it unexplainable. It is impossiple to teach the use of Joomla and Gantry5 to peaople first to CMS and Joomla.
Maybe it was a mistake that I tried to update a ready Gantry4 website to Gantry5; I think it might be fun to work with Gantry5 - if you start a new project for a small website.
At least, thats the point for me: My customer gets nothing new; he gets more basic templates with less features in the frontend.
I really hope Rocketheme will handle Gantry5 in a few month and it will be usable then, so I only wait for that.
As many, I think also you should not hide on Githhub and open an Gantry5 Forum.
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- Djamil Legato
- Elite Rocketeer
- Posts: 2371
- Thanks: 70
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Dan221 wrote:
I really hope Rocketheme will handle Gantry5 in a few month and it will be usable then, so I only wait for that.
As many, I think also you should not hide on Githhub and open an Gantry5 Forum.
How can you say we are hiding behind GitHub when the very fact that Gantry 5 resides on GitHub makes it absolutely open and transparent?
Everything happening with Gantry 5 you can track on GitHub, issues can be reported directly in GitHub and they get replied and handled very promptly as you can notice.
We have had around 500 reported issues / pull requests from many different people, reporting issues, asking questions or even contributing code.
Every single line of code that we change in Gantry 5, not only you can see and differentiate from the previous version, but it also triggers an automatic generation of installable packages ( CI Builds ) so that you can try the very last and new additions to the framework.
We have a dedicated and very active public chat with nearly 300 people in it where people comes, ask questions, discuss ideas, help.
Yes, we haven't set up a dedicated forum for Gantry 5 but we are certainly not hiding, in fact, the Gantry project has never been more public and transparent than this.
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Guys, I can understand your frustration with Gantry 5, it is completely rewritten with new concepts and new approaches. Although I think the biggest problem here is that you just don't want to let Gantry 4 go.
Don't get me wrong, I still do like Gantry 4 very much, it's a very powerful and solid framework that served us all greatly for the past 5 years and we have no intention of dropping support for it for a very long time.
I've been developing Gantry since its very first release up to Gantry 5. This change was necessary, no matter how solid and great Gantry 4 is, it unfortunately carries 5 years of backward compatibilities. Web development moves fast and 5 years is a very long time.
Gantry 5 might take a bit of a learning curve to fully get, I know, but trust me when I say that if you give it a chance, you will definitely fall in love with it. I know this for a fact, I’ve seen it happening many times already in the chatroom. Everyone that comes in and express disappointment or frustration in doing something with Gantry 5, explains the problem, gets helped, and it always end up with them being extremely happy and finding the solution to the problem much easier than they initially thought.
Because that’s what we intended to do with Gantry 5, simplify as much as possible. Things you guys define as cms like, really aren’t. For example, the Particles concept is based on the Gantry 4 Features, except they are now more powerful.
In Gantry 4 you had to pick a position for every single feature you wanted showing in the front-end, in Gantry 5 you just drag it wherever you want.
Like I keep repeating to everyone confused about Gantry 5: you need to approach it with a different mindset, forget all you know about Gantry 4 and start using Gantry 5 as if it was something else. If you have questions open a new issue in GitHub or hop on the Gitter chat and don’t be afraid of asking.
Gantry 5 is still quite new, issues are expected to happen and we are no way near done with it, a lot of great ideas have been planned and suggested by many and we have been listening very closely to the community thanks to the fact Gantry is now entirely public and accessible, but also thanks to Gantry 4 and all the 5 years of feedbacks you guys provided to us.
That said, Gantry 5 is very much usable already, in fact we are close to its release and people have been happily converting their sites from Gantry 4 to Gantry 5 since the very first betas from months ago.
If you still think this is not for you, well then I am very sorry because I truly believe you are missing out. - / Djamil Legato / Lead Developer /
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- DanG
- Preeminent Rocketeer
- Posts: 36750
- Thanks: 3229
- Custom work done
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Richard Parks wrote:
My biggest issue is that simple things like placing a custom module on one page makes no sense to me at all. I have tried watching the videos and I can't seem to get it.
Hi Richard
I'm in my 60's and started with CMS's about 6 years ago. At my age learning curves, such as Gantry 5, are a four letter word. As I work through it I realize that I would have been better off not knowing Gantry 4 and walking in on Gantry 5 cold as I would not have to struggle with "well that's not the way I did it in Gantry 4".
As I work through my issues with Gantry 5 I'm slowly noticing things. In Gantry 4 I would create, in "Joomla", 3 custom HTML modules and in the assignments for each of those I would set respectively Module1->Feature-A, Module2->Feature-B and Module3->Feature-C. DONE.
Now in Gantry 5 I would do the same but yes I have an extra step. I have to go to the Layout Manager of the Outline (template/override) I'm using and create a row in the Feature Section and then drag my 3 custom HTML modules into ONE row with the modules adjacent OR set each module in it's own row - advantage Gantry 5 - DONE.
Now your client says lets use this order -> Module1->Feature-B, Module2->Feature-C and Module3->Feature-A. (Bang head against keyboard at this point)
So in Gantry 4:
1) Open Module1
2) Click on the Position Dropdown and select Feature-B
3) SAVE
4) Open Module2
5) Click on the Position Dropdown and select Feature-C
6) SAVE
7) Open Module3
8 ) Click on the Position Dropdown and select Feature-A
9) SAVE
In Gantry 5:
1) Drag the modules into the desired order
2) SAVE Layout.
So that extra step I mentioned about creating a row for the modules and dragging them into that row, by you having to do this ONCE we were able to remove a lot of code that was required in Gantry 4 to make it more "automatic".
So for me as a Designer the trade off of an extra step or two versus a faster site is a very EASY choice to make.
As I was writing this I was checking my facts in the backend of Ambrosia and happened across the RokSprocket Tabs Feature. The coding behind this is really cool.
A standard RokSprocket Tabs module using Simple provider.
In each item the Description field has a {loadposition fp-feature-x} statement.
In Joomla's Module Manager there are 7 modules fp-feature-1 to fp-feature-7 that contain the HTML code to create the Images and Description in each RokSprocket Tab Panel.
In Gantry 4 I would have to write out this custom code:
<div class="g-grid"> <div class="g-block"> <div class="g-content"> <div class="g-tab-image"> <img src="/Ambrosia/images/rocketlauncher/home/feature/img-01.jpg" alt="Layout - Drag & Drop" /> <div class="g-tab-image-overlay"> <a class="readon" href="#">Read More</a> </div> </div> <div class="g-title-regular">Unlimited layout possibilities powered by a drag & drop interface</div> <a href="#"> <span class="g-tag">Layout</span> </a> <span class="g-small">Drag & Drop</span></div> </div> <div class="g-block"> <div class="g-content"> <div class="g-tab-image"> <img src="/Ambrosia/images/rocketlauncher/home/feature/img-02.jpg" alt="Layout - Particles" /> <div class="g-tab-image-overlay"> <a class="readon" href="#">Read More</a> </div> </div> <div class="g-title-regular">Create and control complex content constructions with Particles</div> <a href="#"> <span class="g-tag">Layout</span> </a> <span class="g-small">Particles</span></div> </div> <div class="g-block"> <div class="g-content"> <div class="g-tab-image"> <img src="/Ambrosia/images/rocketlauncher/home/feature/img-03.jpg" alt="Layout - Positions" /> <div class="g-tab-image-overlay"> <a class="readon" href="#">Read More</a> </div> </div> <div class="g-title-regular">Insert module positions within the layout manager and menu editor</div> <a href="#"> <span class="g-tag">Layout</span> </a> <span class="g-small">Positions</span></div> </div> </div>
In Gantry 5 I open my fp-feature-x module, which is a Gantry Particle, and graphically create what I need.
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As development of Gantry 5 continues you will see more and more Particles that will save you HOURS of coding. Again I put Gantry 5 in the Win column and can't wait to see what the next evolutionary step of CMS using Gantry 5 will bring.
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- deman
- Rocketeer
- Posts: 94
- Thanks: 0
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Hi,
It looks interesting but i dont understand how I can have a module / particle appear on menu items
- on all pages except selected
- only on the selected
- on all pages
can i still use modules like before or do i have to do everthing within de template
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- DanG
- Preeminent Rocketeer
- Posts: 36750
- Thanks: 3229
- Custom work done
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deman wrote:
Hi,
It looks interesting but i dont understand how I can have a module / particle appear on menu items
Please see " Module/Widget Injection "
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