It's not really an appropriate topic, no. It's always better to create your own topic that post in someone else's (especially one that's nearly three month old and dormant).
I will answer your question a little out of order...
Michelle Diamond wrote:
will gantry take over from joomla?
No. Gantry is a framework that needs to sit on top of a Content Management System (CMS). In your case you are using Joomla as the CMS, but your could equally use Wordpress or GRAV - Gantry 5 works on all three.
Michelle Diamond wrote:
i also need to know the difference between creating a gantry module vs adding a particle into an outline. i tried both
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Modules can be assigned to "module positions" on the layout of your outlines. So this means that your outline can be used by many pages with just different modules being added to the page. So using module positions your outline is, in general, page agnostic (i.e. there's nothing page specific on the outline). The other advantage of using a module is that you can use Joomla's ACL to specify which modules are permitted to be seen by which users (i.e. you are using the power of the CMS to control who sees what). So to all intents and purposes you can think of this as analogous to what you had in Gantry 4. The only difference really is that with Gantry 5 you can add your own "module positions" anywhere on the layout that you like and call them whatever you like.
Particles can also be put in modules too by create a "Gantry 5 particle" module you can then use a particle just like it's a module.
If you choose to add particles directly on the layout of your outline then you need to be aware that you are in effect making that outline "page specific"... this would therefore likely increase the number of outlines that you require. Some members actually prefer this and do create one outline for every page on their site as it makes it a little easier to understand. Remember though that you can't choose who sees a particular particle on the layout this way - everyone will see the content. Now at first you might think that putting particle directly on the layout of your outline might mean that you have to duplicate lots of content (e.g. logo, menu, copyright, etc) - this is not the case because this is where another feature of Gantry 5 is useful called "inheritance".
With "inheritance" it's possible to have other outline layouts inherit their content from another outline. This can apply at section level, or particle level, or both. So, as a practical example, in the "base outline" you would set up the layout of your "navigation" section once containing your logo and menu and then have all your other outlines inherit the "navigation" section and it's content to save having to repeat the set-up on every outline layout.
Michelle Diamond wrote:
im struggling to progress with all the dev updates - css, twig, angular, typescript, i dont know where to focus.
You will need some basic CSS skills because you are bound to need to restyle certain elements on your page, but it is these type of questions that are most common in the forum and we can always help with this if you get stuck. Just raise a new topic for EACH question (or very closely related questions).
You do not need to learn TWIG or YAML unless you want to develop your own particles or modify the fuctionality of our existing particles.
Not sure what you mean by Angular and typescript - but I don't see any need to learn either in the context of using Gantry 5 or our templates. Similarly you do not need to learn any javascript of jQuery unless you want to develop your own particles or modify the fuctionality of our existing particles.
Now as to your site specific questions....
You're over thinking this I think... Ask yourself "what would I have done in Gantry 4?" - because if you can answer that then you can do EXACTLY the same in Gantry 5. You "designer" page can just be a single article or a "category blog" of articles for a designer. Once you have that you can link to those pages from anywhere on your site (including any particles that you choose to use).
There are some nice particles in our Gantry 5 template that can give you the "block" or "card" layouts that you are looking for - which one though depends on the exact functionality that you seek. Don't forget also that if you are familiar with roksprocket then there's no reason why you can't use that in a Gantry 5 template either - it certainly still provide some very rich and useful functionality that even some particles struggle to match (especially if you wish to explit content from your CMS e.g. "articles" and "categories").
I hope that helps.
Regards, Mark.