wombat wrote:
RT set the schedule for 4 - 6 weeks between releases. I may be wrong, but I think that since November this has not quite been kept.
That's where time comes in. When we made that blog post about moving away from a self-imposed deadline, our initial estimate of 4-6 weeks was thrown out there. But the basic premise of the entire post was to explain why self-imposed deadlines are a hinderance to innovation. They force you to sacrifice vision for speed.
That was a year ago, and we made an effort to stay true to the 4-6 week idea. This let us explore new things with templates like adding booking features and customizable animations and music playlists, tour date displays, etc. Things that, in the past, would require an extension to accomplish and are baked in to the template with G5.
Three years ago we recommended half a dozen extensions to get the demo content working. Today, just one. Gantry 5. That means every template needs a little more love on the development front, but they're also a bit easier to get up and running.
I and many others have also posted that if you would just let us know what is going on, we may not all be pleased, but we would at least be more understanding. If you let us know that it is going to take longer for the next release and give reasons why BEFORE everyone starts complaining, it would stop a lot of that before it starts.
While we are trying to move away from arbitrary release dates, I agree. I'll do my best to throw out more info about any delays from our typical development time in the future.
We apologize for this situation.
When the release of GRAV was announced, I had specifically asked if this would affect the release of Joomla Templates. The answer was no it would not, it is a completely different team working on GRAV. Unfortunately the next release of a Joomla Template was delayed. When asked why, one of the reasons given was the release of GRAV and getting Templates ported to it.
If it was me that said that I apologize. While Grav ports aren't taking away from Joomla development, there are cases where Gantry 5 needs an update and we can't get a template out the door until that's done. Adding a feature to G5 that the new template hooks to, for example. Sometimes, and I can't even think of an incident offhand, this kind of issue can delay a release, but only by hours or a single day. Even then, it's usually because of Joomla or WordPress and not so much Grav. Grav was made for Gantry 5, essentially.
Here I need to admit that this is not quite true, it is not so much that it is complicated, as it is confusing. The first time I installed a Gantry 5 template on a fresh joomla site my first thought was "where is the template?".
Gantry 5 was a major change. Change creates confusion. We knew this would happen, and we did try to mitigate that confusion by doing things like creating module positions within our themes so it acted as much like Gantry 4 as possible. But, at the end of the day, this just means adding more steps to create the same affects that can be done by dragging and dropping a particle onto the layout.
Gantry 5 is so much easier we actually had to make it more difficult in our RocketLaunchers for folks to accept it. This added to the confusion a bit, and that's why we no longer add the middle man in our RocketLaunchers by default. I hope that all makes sense.
Users communicating with RT - My example might not be all that good, but it is at least something that I had posted here in the forums. It is also true, but we need to let RT know what is going on with us the same that RT should let us know what is going on with them. Ryan has repeatedy asked that we give SPECIFICS. Specific ideas of what we want. What does he get for answers " a Template for a news site", "Templates for sports sites", etc, etc. What I am trying to say, most only post in general what that want.
Design for the Web itself has become a stangant situation with the rise of flat design. The demand for flat design was so high for so long, and continues to be high. Yet, flat design by its very nature is limited. You can only make flat boxes look so different.
So, we created themes like Acronym which re-introduces the concept of depth and drop shadows. It has the bold color presets that are indiciative of the Material design philosophy. Animated backgrounds (something we haven't done since Cygnet) with customizable shapes (something we've never done before) and animated headers were added to make the theme not only stand out, but have a feature set that stands apart from our recent templates.
But does it stand out enough? That's an objective question with a million different answers. Our next theme has a lot to love about it. We know it'll have its fans and, like with any design, its critics. We want to know what you want to see, and it helps to have an idea that goes beyond "news" or "corporate".
The feedback we received was that folks wanted themes that had even more features and more capabilities... but also that were focused in their design. If you asked 100 members what type of theme they want next, you would hear everything from nightclub websites to corporate news. This is one reason all of our themes come with demo pages for blogs, portfolio, corporate about pages, etc. To show that the themes are flexible with uses beyond the demo home page.
We want to create kicka$$ themes that knock the socks off your clients. We want to take your website to new heights. I will make sure that communication is as open as it can be.
The following users have thanked you: wombat