I know progress keeps on moving and I decided to suck it up and figure out how to use a Gantry 5 template because I know the longer I use Gantry 4 the more sites I'll eventually have to leap frog up to 5 when 4 is no longer supported. But after finally figuring out how to do things I found there is no way to use a text editor with particles? While I can make due with that, I can't ask my clients to use straight HTML whenever they want to update a module area... so now I can't use any of the new templates and am stuck using the older templates.
I love Rockettheme and really don't want to start using other templates. Is there any ETA on the ability to use JCE for module positions (particles, whatever).
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Yes you can. You can use a module position particle on your layout and publish your joomla custom html modules to that position. OR, you can put a module instance particle on the layout and choose the customhtml module within that. Or, you can use a custom html particle instead and just put that that on the layout. Or, you can create a Gantry 5 particle module in joomla module manager and again assign that to a module particle position on your layout.
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Web Management, Server Admin, Google Apps Service Provider
Re: Gantry 5 - Yikes
Posted 9 years 4 months ago
Mark,
I think you hit on part of the problem. "There are many ways to achieve this."
Too many ways creates confusion.
Joomla has custom html modules, and there are lots of module extensions that do what most of us need it to do.
While the developers love options, and think it is great to have such things, they forget about the user that needs to edit something. How does the user know where to edit something? Is the content in the template, or a module, or is it content that is pulled up by a module, or pulled up by a component, or particle. Is it a module position or a module instance?
If it is a module, which 'instance/page/template' does that module show up on? Where do I set the settings for where a module shows?
The old grid system was great.
We had sections, and basically 8 columns to do things in. We used the CMS to place our content where we wanted it. G5 is putting the content into the template, and seems to be ignoring the concept of CMS (and the consistency of layout that a CMS offers)
Brian thanks for your comments. Yes but Gantry 5 is not just for Joomla - it's going to work across many CMS platforms - therefore we can't rely on joomla custom html modules for use in Wordpress or other CMS's so hence we have to come up with a CMS independent way of achieving some things whilst still preserving the ability to do the "CMS specific" way of doing things. If you want to so things the traditional joomla way then you can, If you find the functionality provided by Gantry 5 does not meet your requirements then you can Carry on using Gantry 4 (we will support it for a long time yet as the bulk of our template portfolio works on this platform and not Gantry 5).
I am not a Gantry 5 framework or template Developer - I can only tell you what Gantry and the templates provide in terms of functionality. As I've indicated before, I'm sure our developers and the Gantry 5 community would love to hear your views and the best place to do that is in the Gantry 5 github chatroom
https://gitter.im/gantry/gantry5
. We really do welcome opinions and Gantry 5 has already been greatly improved through community feedback. We have a whole ton of things we'd like to do with Gantry 5 (many member requests) but we have limited development resources so it will take some time to incorporate everything our members are asking for.
Please give the Gantry 5 chatroom a try - they're a friendly community and would love to hear your views.
Regards, Mark.
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Web Management, Server Admin, Google Apps Service Provider
Re: Gantry 5 - Yikes
Posted 9 years 4 months ago
Mark, it's hard enough keeping up with other forums.
To have to deal with GitHub is too much for me. Yes, even the daily email summaries are too much.
What would be helpful is for the comments and ideas discussed here to find their own way over to github. Either by someone adding the views to the correct place on github, or by the developers keeping up in the forums. What's that? It's too much for the developers to keep track of the forums while they are on GitHub? Good, so now they understand.
One suggestion to get to them... explain right up-front for unsuspecting users that Gantry 5 is VERY different, and that those wanting to use it should be prepared for a major disruption in how they do things in Joomla.
Gantry 5 is a 'developers' tool, allowing for developers to learn one design tool for websites across multiple platforms.
For those that want 'basic' awesomeness in a template that they can hand to a client without having them need to learn a 'proprietary' system, they should stick with Gantry 4.
I think making that 'warning' stronger, you will get less confusion and complaints. It certainly would have had me take pause and have a peek before setting up a couple of sites with it. (small, simple sites that will easily switch back to Gantry 4).
My only wish is that Gantry 4 be optimized more. Perhaps after the bulk of the work on 5 is done, a small team can review 5 and bring some of the optimization into 4. (not the features, just some of the optimizing).
Brian - I have nothing more to add, I would just be repeating myself otherwise. I don't think it's fair on the original poster of this topic that we discuss this any further here.
Regards, Mark.
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Nice to hear that a common text editor (like JCE) will be available when adding and editing content to particle blocks. My clients will greatly appreciate it. They are oblivious to code.
In general, Rockettheme should keep the end user experience in mind. Clients shouldn't need to know to code, even basic html which may seem novice to developers.