RocketTheme Blog

For those that follow us on Twitter, or Facebook, may have seen references to a new extension we have been working on for some time. RokSprocket is a revolutionary new Joomla 2.5 only extension that has been designed to replace a variety of our existing ‘content’ modules. These include RokStories, RokTabs, RokNewsPager, RokNewsflash, RokMicronews, and basically any module in the RT arsenal that manipulates and displays articles.

What makes this such a powerful extension is that it has been built to be highly plug-able with the ability to support almost any data source. At launch we plan to include Joomla, K2, ZOO and Seblod CCKs, with more platforms being added in future releases. Alongside the plug-able platform capability, the layouts such as Tabs, Features, Headlines, and Lists, and specific themes for these layouts can easily be added via site templates.

RokSprocket

The module itself, follows RokGallery’s revolutionary approach to UI and implements a stunning new compound filter system based on OS X’s Finder functionality. Filtered articles are retrieved instantly via Ajax and can be sorted by sort rules, or you can drag-and-drop the articles to manually order them to fit your needs.

Each article has a layout-configurable set of parameters that can be used to override specific items of that article. For example in the “Tabs” layout, the default configuration lets you override each tab’s title as well as setting a tab ‘icon’ with a simple to use image picker which support both Joomla and RokGallery.

A you can probably tell from the functionality involved, RokSprocket is a very powerful and full featured extension that is a real game-changer when it comes to displaying content in Joomla. However, this has been a major endeavor and we’ve built our new March Joomla template to really showcase this extension. To ensure the template and RokSprocket release is of the highest quality, we’ve decided to dedicate a few more days to testing and bug-fixing.

With February being a short month and this extra time, we plan on releasing both the new March Joomla template and RokSprocket on March the 5th.

As this is a few days later than we traditionally release our Joomla template we have given an Extra 5 days of access to every current Joomla Club member. We really hate to miss our self-imposed deadlines but in this case we feel that a quality release is a worth a few days extra development time. I’m sure you will agree when you start using it!

NOTE: RokSprocket is ONLY available for Joomla 2.5. Our existing Joomla 1.5 compatible extensions will be provided as part of the Joomla 1.5 RocketLauncher.