Gantry 5 user unfriendly
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- David Goode
- Preeminent Rocketeer
- Posts: 17058
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- Web Designer and Host
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Although I am a volunteer mod here and probably biased, I also need to make a sensible profit from the work I do, especially as I have to pay taxes and insurance out of those profits and still have enough to support my family.
But we live in a very real and modern world and when I see comments that something as personal as a website template should be all-singing and all-dancing straight from the start to suit any website then that disheartens me. My clients deserve better than me taking a template, throwing in their content and then charging big bucks for doing next to nothing. Sure it is profitable but is it ethical?
Because the technology is constantly changing, web developers need to recognise that they have to invest time in updating their skills and knowledge so they can give their clients the best options. Some clients will complain that prices are too high, but over the years I have found that those clients are the ones who eat into your time and won't pay their bills. I am happy to lose those clients as they are more trouble than they are worth.
Good clients will look for value for money but will also compromise on cost if they understand the reasoning behind the higher prices. These sort of negotiations only work if there is transparency between the parties. I always let clients know I am using a RocketTheme template as a starting point. That is much better than letting them think they have something bespoke which they later find out is a bought template. They are paying for more than just my time - they are paying for skills and knowledge that they themselves do not have. These are the things that I have had to learn in my own time, unpaid. This is recouped by charging higher fees than some of the other developers who continue to use older technology because it is easier.
Gantry 5 takes some learning but it is well worth the effort. I can do things for clients now that were unthinkable previously.
And just for the record, I was one of the last mods to adapt to G5 as I found G4 so much easier. Now I have adapted I love it!
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- Björn Hallier
- Sr. Rocketeer
- Posts: 108
- Thanks: 15
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I personally think Gantry5 is great (besides the learning curve) however the particles mostly useless for writing articles etc.
Particles can only be used on small websites with very few information on it otherwise managing and editing particles is a real pain in the ass
The huge problem is that the particles can't be edited inside the articles, they must be loaded like modules.
And that makes working with them almost useless (I'm not talking about a homepage with a few pages where you create only a few particles for the main site etc.).
If one wants to use them extensively inside articles particles are a complete nightmare.
And this is where Gantry5 falls behind: even though the basis is great and flexbox is used, the big problem is how fast you can write an article with particle features. It's so much time consuming that you better forget everything about particles and use something completely different.
When Gantry5 came out I had the hope that particles will evolve in some kind of pagebuilder which can be used inside JCE or something else. But this will never happen due to the cms independence.
My dream would be something like Gantry5 and the possibilities of the particles inside JCE - that would be fantastic.
Right now Gantry5 is just half the way and the particles are in most cases pretty useless since creating and maintaining them is much to time consuming.
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- David Goode
- Preeminent Rocketeer
- Posts: 17058
- Thanks: 890
- Web Designer and Host
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Hi Björn,
Thanks for your feedback.
Particles have always had limitations and in most instances we have designed particles to suit a specific design function for a selected template. Some of the more useful particles have evolved further. We like to think that we are open enough for good suggestions to be taken onboard by the development team and progressed if practical.
Could you give some actual examples of what you would want to use inside an article and how you would expect the particle to behave?
This would give us a better idea of how our particles should evolve.
Happy New Year
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- alex roseland
- Newbie
- Posts: 5
- Thanks: 0
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I have previously used shape5 and am brand now to RocketThemes. But I'm totally confused by these particles. One of the great benefits to Joomla is easy frontend editing without even needing to go into the Admin area. It appears so far the Particles have gotten rid of this key benefit. Now I need to go and navigate through a contrived system of abstractly named particles that contain modules that contain particles? I feel like I'm in Inception...
When taking a random block of text on the site, it can be very unclear exactly where that is located on the back end within a list of modules that contain particles. This adds a massive headache when dealing with a large site with lots of items. I feel like I must be missing something... is there a setting to enable front end editing of the particles?
I didn't find that anywhere on the documentation? docs.gantry.org/gantry5/particles/particles
Please let me know if I am misunderstanding something or if there is an easier way of doing this. If not I may need to switch back to shape5
I would like to take a template and simply change text or removed items. I don't want to have to create my own unique structuring to the site.
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- Helia Technologies
- Jr. Rocketeer
- Posts: 31
- Thanks: 0
- I completely agree and I voiced my opinion before. I love rocket themes and think it is by far the best out there however Gantry 5 with the particles are a huge p i t a. I had hoped As Time passed it would become less so but it hasn't. I continue to use exclusively Gantry for templates which continue to be easy to use fast to deploy and make customers and me happy
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- alex roseland
- Newbie
- Posts: 5
- Thanks: 0
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These particles seem to mostly cater to developers with complex structuring requirements, this has to be a smaller minority of people. Most people will use templates because they want increased simplicity and fast dev time frames. Particles are counter productive to this.
To have the best of both worlds, the templates should be made purely with modules that can be edited from the front end. And then let advanced developers who want particles implement them in the back-end. This would provide simplicity to base users and capability when it is needed.
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- Helia Technologies
- Jr. Rocketeer
- Posts: 31
- Thanks: 0
- I am a developer and honestly I don't see the sense in it I'm happy looking at PHP and HTML when I need to make special changes within Joomla and Rocket theme Gantry for templates. pleaseexcuse my grammarand Google voice dictation
- Last Edit: 5 years 7 months ago by Helia Technologies.
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- alex roseland
- Newbie
- Posts: 5
- Thanks: 0
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Yeah I agree. There seems to be plenty of options with unique structuring that don't require such an added degree of complexity. In fact simply putting muliple modules or customer HTML/css in positions seems to anything strange I might need. I think the good people at rocketthemes have gotten a little carried away with design concepts.
The problem with experts is they assume everybody else knows about as much as they do. In reality the spread is far greater and the average person requires more simplicity not complexity.
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- MrT
- Preeminent Rocketeer
- Posts: 101084
- Thanks: 13481
- Web Designer/Developer
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alex roseland - I will answer you specific questions...
If frontend editing is your primary requirement then Gantry 5 is not for you because (at the moment) there is no way of editing particles in the frontend. Modules and articles can of course still be edited in the frontend in Gantry 5, but not particles. It has always been our intention to add frontend editing capability of particles (and we do have an improvement ticket for this on the Gantry 5 project) but other matters continue to take a higher priority.
Particles do not have to be put in "Gantry 5 particle" module wrapper as they can be directly put onto the layout of your outline. You only need to use the "Gantry 5 particle" module wrapper if you want to assign a Gantry 5 particle to a module position.
alex roseland wrote:I would like to take a template and simply change text or removed items. I don't want to have to create my own unique structuring to the site
I'm not sure why you think you have to create "unique structuring". Editing the "out of the box" template is exactly what most members do, they change the text and image of the template we designed, Gantry 5 makes it fairly straightforward to do that. If you do have any specific items that you are struggling with then please raise a separate forum topic in the appropriate template forum and our team will be very happy to assist you.
Please don't misinterpret what I'm saying - There is no doubt that there is a learning curve to go through to use Gantry 5 well. Also, we're not claiming that everything is perfect or what we would wish to provide either but we do think that the advantages of Gantry 5 outweigh the disadvantages of using it.
We continue to develop Gantry 5 and it's templates and particles. Members have asked us to port some of the popular Gantry 4 template to Gantry 5 and we've started doing this now with the recent release of "Myriad" and "Anacron" for Gantry 5. I would also point out that Gantry 5 works across three different CMS platforms (Joomla, Wordpress, and GRAV). If you haven't yet looked at GRAV then you may like to do that - it's certainly proving to be extremely popular right now and when combined with Gantry 5 offers a great deal of flexibility and speed.
We do thank you for you comments, we do listen and we do act upon our membership feedback. Obviously though we do have limited development resources and some developments will take time to materialise.
To all the other members who took the time to respond in this topic - we thank you for your feedback but it would be inappropriate to respond to everyones point of view in this one topic. If anyone has a specific issue please raise a separate topic and we will be very happy 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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- Brian Shea
- Sr. Rocketeer
- Posts: 176
- Thanks: 18
- Web Management, Server Admin, Google Apps Service Provider
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if one of the benefits of Gantry 5 is that it will be easy to move our sites from Joomla to Wordpress, then that I am all in.
In all my Joomla G5 sites, I have stayed away from particles and non-joomla core features. I don't want a CMS on top of a CMS.
However, as I start thinking of switching to Wordpress, I wonder if the it makes sense.
If I have a Joomla site in a G5 theme, and I use the particles and page layouts instead of the Joomla core features (besides articles and menus), will I be able to bring those settings over to a Wordpress site (using same RT G5 theme, just for WP)? -
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