RocketTheme Blog

Your website is more than just a place to promote your brand and/or products. It’s arguably the single largest point of contact your customers may have with your business, outside of a brick and mortar storefront. It’s where you make your initial pitch to new visitors, share information with your community, and drive traffic to places you’d like your visitors to go.

For nearly four years here at RocketTheme, we’ve maintained the same prices for our memberships. As the platforms we support have grown more powerful and complex, web design trends have also become more involved and time consuming. Because of this, with the launch of our new RocketTheme site in the very near future, we will be adjusting our prices slightly to help offset the increased cost of development and support.

James Spencer has been a valued member of the RocketTheme team since 2007 and has been involved in Joomla product development, documentation, and support throughout that time. He holds two degrees in Law, and currently resides in the UK.

In this article, we’ll ask James a series of questions in order to get to know him a bit more.

Back in January we reflected in our blog on 2012 and looked forward to what you could expect to see from RocketTheme in 2013. Now that six months have passed I thought it would be great to see what we've achieved and what we have coming in the second half of the year.

As we reflect on the past 12 months, we are really proud of what we achieved in 2012. We moved from fixed layouts to more modern responsive web layouts, we started developing Joomla templates and the vast majority of our existing extensions to support Joomla 3.0. We also created and refined our ground-breaking RokSprocket extension that is now available for Joomla 2.5 and 3.0 as well as WordPress. We also have started converting some of our previously released Joomla 2.5 templates to Joomla 3.0. To help enable this we had a major update to our Gantry framework. The new 4.0 version has a new back-end design, speed and performance optimizations, support for responsive layouts, and a brand new default front-end template based on Twitter Bootstrap. We continue to translate these advances we make on our Joomla products to WordPress and of course phpBB.

We covered some of the implementation details of supporting responsive design in Gantry 4 in the previous article, and in this article we're going to explain how responsiveness impacts extensions. A question that has come up several times since we started these articles is, with Gantry 4 will my site be responsive? The short answer is no, but the long answer is that it could be, but it takes more than just the framework to make that happen. Let me explain in more detail...

As outlined in the previous article, we are hard at work developing Gantry 4 that will be providing all the bits needed to create responsive designs. In this article I wanted to outline exactly how that will work and what features you can expect.

After evaluating all the responsive frameworks and various solutions we have chosen to use the responsive system from the Twitter Bootstrap framework. Bootstrap is a project from the talented folks at Twitter that was designed to provide "simple and flexible HTML, CSS, and JavaScript for popular user interface components and interactions". If you have been using RokSprocket or RokPad in your projects you may not realize that these were built with elements from Bootstrap. New for Bootstrap 2, is an all new responsive design scaffolding that utilizes a grid system with media queries to provide support for various display types.

Unless you have been living under a rock for the past year you will have noticed a growing trend in web design called "Responsive Design". The premise of responsive design is that with the prolific growth in mobile devices, and their vastly varied display sizes, a web site can be designed to adapt to these platforms utilizing media queries. The previous leading school of thought was that the best approach was to provide a mobile specific view that was independent of the main design. This concept quickly became unmaintainable with the popularity of larger display phones and tablets. While we have up to this point been releasing templates and themes based on the older trend, with next month's release we are moving towards the newer responsive trend. This is the first part in a series of articles that outline RocketTheme's journey down this road.

Over the past several months, companies and developers around the world such as Google, Facebook, Microsoft, Drupal and a host of others have been making a concerted effort to end support for Internet Explorer 7 as its marketshare continues to decline each month. As of this month, IE7 usage has dropped to between 2% and 4% worldwide.

I want to keep this short and simple, we have something very special in-store for you this week :) As a sign of appreciation for all your support throughout these years we're running a special promotion till midnight on the 24th of April, 2012. You will receive access to over $600 worth of unique, premium bonuses from our partners for new sign-ups, renewals, and current members.