SOLVED It pains me to write this
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- Rae French
- Elite Rocketeer
- Posts: 639
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- IT Consultant
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Is there any hope that future templates will be designed for Gantry 4?
I have tried Gantry 5 three separate times with hours of effort. I ended up all three times dumping the sites and recreating them with Gantry 4. Now this is very difficult to write because with all the years that I have been with RocketTheme (from the beginning), I have never before felt like I should be looking for another solution. In my opinion, Gantry 5 is a step backwards. Yes, I can see that there was more functionality built into it (probably due to myopia alone) but the foundation is adolescent. Where Gantry 4 incorporated logic, Gantry 5 feels more like WordPress in its mishmash of toss-this-in-and-let's-see-what-happens approach.
So from this loyal RocketTheme member, I will not be renewing my subscription next June if some effort isn't put into Gantry 4 or a real upgrade to Gantry 4 that makes sense. -
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- Best wishes,
Rae
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- MrT
- Preeminent Rocketeer
- Posts: 101084
- Thanks: 13481
- Web Designer/Developer
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Rae French wrote:
Is there any hope that future templates will be designed for Gantry 4?
I have tried Gantry 5 three separate times with hours of effort. I ended up all three times dumping the sites and recreating them with Gantry 4. Now this is very difficult to write because with all the years that I have been with RocketTheme (from the beginning), I have never before felt like I should be looking for another solution. In my opinion, Gantry 5 is a step backwards. Yes, I can see that there was more functionality built into it (probably due to myopia alone) but the foundation is adolescent. Where Gantry 4 incorporated logic, Gantry 5 feels more like WordPress in its mishmash of toss-this-in-and-let's-see-what-happens approach.
So from this loyal RocketTheme member, I will not be renewing my subscription next June if some effort isn't put into Gantry 4 or a real upgrade to Gantry 4 that makes sense.
Hi Rae, I'm sorry that feel like this. Gantry 5 is our strategic framework going forward and all new templates will be developed for this platform rather than Gantry 4 from now on. Gantry 5 has been developed from the ground up to be a fast framework that provides modern functionality for modern browsers. The platform has (and continues to be) developed as a result of member and community feedback.
There is no doubt that Gantry 5 is different to Gantry 4 and introduces new concepts that you will be unfamiliar with. Therefore, there is a learning curve to go through. Initially a lot of members are daunted by this, but after spending some time with Gantry 5 they quickly grow to love it and would not wish to go back to Gantry 4.
That said, there is nothing wrong with Gantry 4 if you wish to carry on using it. The bulk of our template portfolio is for Gantry 4 and we will continue to support that for the foreseeable future.
If you look through the Gantry 5 templates you will see that we have listened to the feedback from members and have made the more recent template much easier to understand. In fact, a lot of it is very similar to Gantry 4. In the recent templates for Gantry 5 there are much fewer outlines, and those outline layouts largely just have "module position" particles on the layout. What that means is that you can carrry on assigning modules to module positions in Joomla just like you always have, there's much less of the new Gantry 5 features that you need to learn to get going. Another feature we have provided in Gantry 5 is the ability to load a "Gantry 4" preset (in fact a few) this give you a layout with all the familiar module positions that you are used to with Gantry 4.
I also did have a quick look through all of your recents posts and I couldn't find any where you had asked for help with Gantry 5 or any of it's templates? So, if you struggled alone then maybe that explains your viewpoint. As a subscribing member we encourage you to ask questions about Gantry 5 or it's templates at any time - hopefully you would agree that our responsive support is a key deferentiator between us and our competitors. We're very pleased to help you at any time, so there is no need to struggle and become frustrated with Gantry 5.
Our documentation for Gantry 5 (and the new Gantry 5 templates) is pretty comprehensive now, better than it's ever been, and we will continue to improve it. It's important that you do read through this documentation, and we'd also like to hear any feedback you might have where you think it is confusing or lacking. http://docs.gantry.org/gantry5
I can assure that our development approach is not to "toss-this-in-and-let's-see-what-happens" nor to take a "myopia" approach - we designed Gantry 5 from the ground-up and the community is also very active in helping us develop Gantry 5 too (Gantry 5 is an open source project). You can join in the Gantry 5 community chat here https://gitter.im/gantry/gantry5 where you can speak directly to our developers.
Gantry 5 works on both Joomla and Wordpress CMS's but was developed first for Joomla (as we do with most of our products).
We would be disappointed if you felt you could not renew your subscription. We don't want to lose any of our loyal customers. But, I do wish you well in whatever you decide. Remember, we're here to help, and we really do very much appreciate your feedback (which I will share with our developers).
Regards, Mark. -
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- Brian Shea
- Sr. Rocketeer
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- Web Management, Server Admin, Google Apps Service Provider
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Rae,
I feel that pain, though I have come to terms with it. Things change. Including Gantry 5 in the last few months.
I'm still waiting a few more releases before diving in again to learn. When I first tried, I was horrified to see a 'cms' on top of Joomla. Everything was suddenly geared to tech-head coders and designers that want to make super whiz-bang sites. 'Simple' seemed to be far from the developers thoughts. It might have been simple for them and their peers, but it neglected how many of us use the templates for simple sites, and maybe use specific components for specific needs.
I looked at it a second time and already started to notice some positive changes, but I wasn't willing to put the time in to learn something that was still transforming, especially with 'simple' documentation being scarce.
As I follow in this forum, I am watching the changes and improvements, and I'm hoping to try it out again knowing much has improved.
It helps to also remember that it is not RocketTheme that is changing. In reality, it is the crazy pace of web technology and trends that is causing the big changes. And more non-tech people are getting used to quick/easy sites from weebly, wix and web.com, which seems to be how Gantry5 may 'appear' to the non-tech.
We'll see. -
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for the non-technical, non-geeks
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- MrT
- Preeminent Rocketeer
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- Web Designer/Developer
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Brian Shea - thank you for your comments. Yes, I'm sure that if you looked at the more recent template for Gantry 5 (Requiem and Salient) you will find them easier to understand now. Please see my explanation as to why in my answer to Rae above.
Gantry 5 is constantly being improved as a result of community feedback and, in general, once you have gone through the learning curve most people love Gantry 5. Give it another go.
btw - our documentation specialist is asking for feedback on our documentation here http://www.rockettheme.com/forum/gantry-framework/248143-expanding-on-gantry-s-documentation - let him know your views.
Regards, Mark. - Last Edit: 8 years 6 months ago by MrT.
- Please search forums before posting. Please make sure your post includes the version of the CMS you are using and a link to the problem. Annotations on screenshots can also be helpful to explain problems/goals. Please use the "secure" tab for confidential information.
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- Dan Gamber
- Sr. Rocketeer
- Posts: 122
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Mark: Thank you for your replies; I know it's a difficult job to play the 'publicist' and having to explain the celebrities abhorant behavior away. I'm glad I found this thread, because it articulates the frustration that I, as a Andy Miller fan from way back in the Mambo/Joomla split days (how many of you remember those?), am currently feeling. I've been around since almost the beginning, Rae, like you.
And Brian! You nailed it on the head. The Gantry 5 developers have built a CMS on top of Joomla. Some things just make you scratch your head in wonder.
So let me pontificate, share my current point of view, and maybe I'll validate someone else in the process. I am currently a Senior UX Designer (day job) and chief evangelist for the voice of the consumer at a big health company. My job is to always be thinking about how a click, a piece of content, or a digital experience is going to affect the user. When designing a new product or app, I try to understand what gaps, pain points, or needs exist in the user's experiences and how we can solve for them.
I'm not sure what problems or pain points Gantry 5 solves for. The user experience is clunky (in all fairness I'm working with Callisto, not one of the newer templates). The basic constructs of Joomla, articles and modules seem to be all but irrelevant and I now have to create a custom template for every page in the website? I thought maybe this was just the Rocket Theme template stylists showing off. I didn't want to have to update the logo on every page (template) of my website, so I tried just applying one template to all my sub-pages--and now all my pages have the exact same content (Typography page). Heh, funny.
So, it must be other things. Does it load pages faster? I hope so, that would be a nice one as Joomla has gotten heavy over the years. I'm guessing it's more to do with making template development extensible across Joomla and Wordpress platforms to reduce development time. This is good business from a dev cost standpoint--but not if it's at the expense of users feeling good about your product and services. Or is it to ultimately eliminate the need for Joomla all together? Will Gantry eventually have it's own article and user management thereby making it blazing fast and a complete CMS all it's own? What about third party developers? That's an interesting thought.
Tell Andy if he wants to, he can give me a call and we can discuss his consumer's (my) whining. I'm still one of his biggest fans. -
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- MrT
- Preeminent Rocketeer
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- Web Designer/Developer
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Hi Dan - thanks for taking the time to give us your feedback. We really do appreciate every bit of feedback, good, bad or indifferent. I'll try and answer your two points below:Dan Gamber wrote:
I'm not sure what problems or pain points Gantry 5 solves for. The user experience is clunky (in all fairness I'm working with Callisto, not one of the newer templates). The basic constructs of Joomla, articles and modules seem to be all but irrelevant and I now have to create a custom template for every page in the website? I thought maybe this was just the Rocket Theme template stylists showing off. I didn't want to have to update the logo on every page (template) of my website, so I tried just applying one template to all my sub-pages--and now all my pages have the exact same content (Typography page). Heh, funny.Callisto was our first template really (apart from the very simple Hydrogen template). I think it's fair to say that we were all learning at that time too and we'd agree that somethings could have been done simpler/different to what they were at that time. We've listened to lots of feedback from the community and I think that you'll find that if your look at the more recent template (Salient, Requiem, and now Kraken) that they are much easier to understand primarily because there are far fewer outlines and the layouts in general predominantly consist of module positions. In this way, you can really do things much the same way as you did with Gantry 4, that is... create modules in joomla module manager and assign them to module positions on the layout.
So, "what problems or pain points Gantry 5 solves for (us)"? In Gantry 5...
1. ... you can easily create as many module positions as you like, call them what you like, and size them as you like. That's definitely a big step forward
2. ... we've introduced "particles" that provide easy to use chunks of functionality without the need for coding, these can be added directly to a layout so you don't have to be familiar with Joomla first. Also, for those already familiar with Joomla, you can use the particle functionality within Joomla modules (Gantry 5 particle module), so again you can just assign them to positions like any other module.
3. ... you can control the "breakpoints" for the different viewports yourself and also when the mobile menu appears - this is not hardcoded, it's simply a setting now.
I could go on, but rest assured that Gantry 5 does solve a great many issues because it's been built from the ground-up.
The basic constructs of articles and modules from Joomla are not irrelevant - you can carry on using these just as you always have but also we've given new ways to add your content too which are platform agnostic (so you don't need to understand Joomla or Wordpress in-depth to use Gantry 5).
As I said earlier, you can now have content directly on a layout, so, if you assign (or default) that layout to a menu item then you are going to get any content that is directly on that layout (your typography example). If you want to share the same outline amongst many pages then that push you towards keeping the layout content to primarily module positions. If, on the other hand, you have a page that is totally unique content, then you could construct the whole page content entirely on the layout and not need to use any joomla modules at all. The reality will be somewhere between those two extremes.
Dan Gamber wrote:So, it must be other things. Does it load pages faster? I hope so, that would be a nice one as Joomla has gotten heavy over the years. I'm guessing it's more to do with making template development extensible across Joomla and Wordpress platforms to reduce development time. This is good business from a dev cost standpoint--but not if it's at the expense of users feeling good about your product and services. Or is it to ultimately eliminate the need for Joomla all together? Will Gantry eventually have it's own article and user management thereby making it blazing fast and a complete CMS all it's own? What about third party developers? That's an interesting thought.
Absolutely it loads faster, Gantry 5 does much more using flat files now rather than the database. We've done lots of measurements and can prove it is significantly faster. Yes, of course we would like to make sure that we are getting the best out of development effort, so that is why Gantry 5 was designed from the outset to work on many CMS (currently it's Joomla and Wordpress but we will be adding others too). It's also true that we would not want to be dependent upon any one CMS (again why Gantry 5 is designed to work on many). Of course that also explains why there are some new concepts in Gantry 5 that are platform agnostic.
Whilst Gantry 5 works in harmony with a CMS it can and does work with the CMS's user and article management, there's no need for us to reinvent that wheel. But, that's not to say that we will depend upon it either. We have lots of plans for the future and as you would expect I can't share them all with you right now, but Gantry 5 is our strategic platform and it's development will be shaped by community/member feedback (so please keep providing it). What does it mean for third-parties? One of the things we'd really like to improve is the ability to import/export/package Gantry 5 particles, this paves the way for developers to create their own particles and share/sell them going forward (but we're not quite there yet).
Dan Gamber wrote:Tell Andy if he wants to, he can give me a call and we can discuss his consumer's (my) whining. I'm still one of his biggest fans.
Yes of course I will let Andy know about this topic.
On a final note, I'd like to add that if you are struggling at any time to understand Gantry 5 or it's templates please do post a topic in the appropriate forum and we'll be very glad to assist you.
Regards, Mark. - Please search forums before posting. Please make sure your post includes the version of the CMS you are using and a link to the problem. Annotations on screenshots can also be helpful to explain problems/goals. Please use the "secure" tab for confidential information.
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- Andy Miller
- Preeminent Rocketeer
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- Web Kahuna
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Hi everyone, I just wanted to let you know that I have been aware of this thread since the start, and I definitely read every comment on it. Also, not just me, but the entire G5 team.
First off, I think Mark hit a lot of the major points I would of wanted to cover in his last reply. So thanks Mark!
Second, let me say that G4 was a great platform, but we were severely limited by it in how we could improve certain things, and of course, we wanted/needed to improve on performance. G5 was developed from scratch in order to address G4 limitations and make it even more flexible. Gantry 5 is all about speed, flexibility, and options. If you want to do things the traditional way, then you can use built-in CMS features to do that. If you just want a simple site, then you don't need to hop all over the platform to do it, you can just use Gantry particles.
Gantry 5 gives you this choice. Did we get a bit over-excited about our super cool particle system in the first release of a Gantry 5 template, sure we did
We were just trying to show off what it could do, but that doesn't mean to say you can't do things the way you always did if needed. It is a learning curve for us too, and we have addressed that in subsequent releases. I think that releases from this point on will have a more curated balance
I'm not sure if you guy can remember but Gantry v1 was ambitious, and had lots of functionality missing. Over the span of 4 years we improved it into Gantry 4, it took time. G5 has the advantage of five years of Gantry know-how, and we had worked on it for over a year, but we had to release it in order to get the feedback and real-world testing in order to improve it. So please be patient with us, when I say that we are going to continue to improve it, and your feedback is going to ensure it is improved in the right direction.
There are some big things we had planned for G5 that we just couldn't get done in time. We decided it was better to release with what we had (already had some huge improvements over G4), and then incrementally add these in subsequent releases.
You can see that list here: github.com/gantry/gantry5/wiki/Gantry-5-...tion-and-Time-Travel
G5.2 which we are working on now is going to have 2 or 3 of these items, and will make things much better.
So after all that I would ask you guys to be patient with the changes. I know changes are hard, and it's quick to easy to find things you don't like, but also look at the benefits G5 brings. Of course keep letting us know about your experiences and I know together we will build something really special.
NOTE: To ensure transparency and your full understanding I will mention that you might of noticed I carefully didn't mention Joomla specifically. We focused quite heavily on Joomla in Gantry1-4 and then 'ported' it to WordPress. We got severely burned by this approach as it was not easy to port, and resulted in a very different way of dealing with things for other platforms. Unless you are in a bubble, you will know that the popularity of Joomla is not what it once was, and as a business, we needed to ensure we built something that would allow us to more easily work with multiple platforms. Diversification and again that word, choice, is the key here. This doesn't mean that we are leaving Joomla, far from it, we are doubling down and supporting it as the first G5 platform. However this does mean we can bring a more native friendly solution to WordPress, and next, Grav. This gives you our members more choices, and more consistency between the plaforms you now have to choose from.
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- Michael R Williams
- Jr. Rocketeer
- Posts: 27
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Hello,
Everyone, Rockettheme Developers and Clients alike made excellent and relivant points in this thread. I am glad they are being addressed and I think we can all have patience with its growth. Here is my major concern.. Compatibility... I think one of the most important things to work out is making sure it is compatible with the browsers we use today. Each and every browser I have used, chrome, IE, and Edge have their own dificiencies in one way or another... I think its very important that which ever you chose to edit with it should work the same way... or the developer should express what browser will give best results.
I have been moving back and forth between browsers just to make sure everything can be edited correctly..
I love gantry 5 and love the direction you guys are going with it but I believe you could aleviate alot of pain by making sure this works in atleast one of the browsers correctly. I know it took me a long time to figure out that I was doing things correctly it was just a speciific browser that wasnt processing it correctly.
Just my two cents.
By the way.. all of the support staff are amazing with providing help.
Thank you,
Mike - Last Edit: 8 years 6 months ago by Michael R Williams.
- Ambrosia, Requiem and Kraken
Joomla: Latest
Gantry: Latest
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- MrT
- Preeminent Rocketeer
- Posts: 101084
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- Web Designer/Developer
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Michael R Williams - thank you to you first of all for providing your feedback. There is no doubt that will always be differences between browsers. In theory they're all supposed to comply with W3C guidelines, the reality is that they sadly don't. We endeavour to make sure that Gantry 5 works with all the modern browsers that have a significant market share, our browser requirements are detailed here
http://docs.gantry.org/gantry5/basics/system-requirements#browser-requirements
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I'd like to understand the particular issues that you encountered and in what browser? The only outstanding issue I'm aware of is a bug in the Chrome browser itself (over which we have no control) that causes menu items not to show on the Gantry 5 admin "assignments" tab - is that the one you are referring to?
Regards, Mark. - Please search forums before posting. Please make sure your post includes the version of the CMS you are using and a link to the problem. Annotations on screenshots can also be helpful to explain problems/goals. Please use the "secure" tab for confidential information.
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- Gordon Sutton
- Hero Rocketeer
- Posts: 327
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- Retired.
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Andy's comment
"but we had to release it in order to get the feedback and real-world testing in order to improve it. So please be patient with us, when I say that we are going to continue to improve it, and your feedback is going to ensure it is improved in the right direction."
speaks volumes. Grantry 5, thus far, is like a company delivering a car with the motor or accessories. They are great but they are not here now. Just drive around and praise what we have done.
I don't think that dumping an unfinished product on your users for testing is a professional thing to do. Having been in the business for over forty years I never allowed or was allowed to put a system in place that was a buggy and limited as this. I would have been fired.
Just my opinion. - Last Edit: 8 years 6 months ago by Gordon Sutton.
- I probably did something wrong.
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