RocketTheme Blog

One of the best ways to improve the performance of a sluggish websites comes in the form of image optimization. As sites become increasingly visual, it’s easy to get carried away and add significant amounts of data to each page load. This can quickly bog down your server, increase load times for visitors, and do a number on your bandwidth bill.

One simple and easy solution to this problem is to run your site’s images through an image optimizer. By reducing the file size without significantly impacting an image’s visual appeal, you can achieve faster page load times and lower per-visitor bandwidth usage which will make you and your visitors very happy.

Read more ...

We've received a lot of feedback from our community recently asking how various templates can be best modified to meet the needs of a variety of sites. From corporate enterprises to personal portfolios, our community is as diverse as it gets.

That's why we've designed all of our Gantry-powered templates and themes to be easily modified without any programming or website design experience required. In fact, there is very little you can't do with one of our templates after just a few minutes of working with the settings made available in the back end of Joomla or WordPress.

Read 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.

Read more ...

RokSprocket 2 is a major release of RokSprocket for Joomla and WordPress that extends our powerful RokSprocket module to include a new ‘simple’ content provider. This allows for on-the-fly creation of content directly within the RokSprocket module without the need of existing articles from one of the available content providers.

Essentially, you can create a powerful interactive showcase on the fly that enhances your visitor's experience on your site and directs them to specific links and information you would have to create an article in support of otherwise.

Read more ...

RokUpdater is the newest member of the RocketTheme family of extensions for Joomla. It is an answer to our member's desire for an easier method to update club and free extensions.

RokUpdater takes care of authentication for you so Joomla can download and install the new file(s) without any further action required on your part.

Read more ...

Whenever the topic of Joomla template frameworks comes up, the big names get bandied around, along with a few less well-known solutions. Inevitably, Gantry is mentioned, and usually in disparaging tones along with adjectives such as "heavy", "bloated", and "slow.” I think this generally stems from a lack of education and understanding about what Gantry brings to the table, how it performs tasks, and how to get the best out of it.

Read more ...

This guide is a brief overview of the tools for self help, providing you with the abilities to debug your own issues and identify what and how to customize in the same manner as the RocketTheme Team. Most styling issues, whether bugs or customization requests, are typically very easy to address yourself.

This guide outlines how to inspect, debug, amend and customize using LESS.

Read more ...

Watchful is a relatively new service that focuses on providing a unified dashboard that allows backups, updating, monitoring, and other services for multiple Joomla installations. This service has been created by a joint venture between Anything Digital who are also the authors of sh404SEF,and inetis, a Swiss-based Joomla consultancy company. We here at RocketTheme have been testing Watchful in an effort to make our demo server more manageable, and I wanted to take the opportunity to relay our findings and thoughts.

Read more ...

What an exciting day it has been! It seems that last night there was a widespread update for Redhat/Centos operating systems that run the webservers of many web hosting providers. This update included a version of the libxml2 library that is used by PHP when utilizing XML. This updated version of libxml2 seems to be causing widespread problems for existing PHP frameworks, projects and code that make use of those XML features. One of these is our own RokCommon library that is used by RokGallery and RokSprocket for both Joomla and WordPress. We make use of a static method called DOMDocument::schemavalidate() which seems to have broken with this last update, so please read more for a quick fix...

Read more ...

We originally developed RokTwittie in May of 2009 when Twitter was in full swing. It was created as a very configurable and highly customizable Joomla module with many advanced features. Over the years RokTwittie has become the staple of many a Joomla and WordPress site. Unfortunately, Twitter is making changes that mean we can no longer effectively develop this extension.

Read more ...