Latest Gantry News

Version 3.0.0 Released

We're really pleased to release the latest-and-greatest version 3.0.0 of the Gantry Framework and the associated Gantry core template. This release is an important milestone for Gantry as it adds custom iPhone/iPod Touch support as well as an update notification system as well as lots of other goodies and bug-fixes.

The iPhone/iPod Touch support is very cool because the core functionality is all contained within the Gantry framework itself. Some minor templateDetails.xml changes are needed to take advantage of this functionality in templates released prior to Gantry 3.0's release, but we will soon be updating those other Gantry templates to take advantage. Along with the ability to automatically send iPhone/iPod Touch users to a specially optimized iPhone/iPod Touch layout, we have created a custom touchmenu system that work really well on touch-based devices where traditional hover/drop-down menus fail miserably. Another great feature is the ability to map existing module positions to the new 'mobile' positions. This way you can provide an optimized version of your content to your users and you don't have to recreate all your module positions from scratch. We also have included the ability to configure the colors and layout of the iPhone/iPod Touch UI via the template administrator utilizing CSS3 and HTML5 techniques.

We have broken new ground with this stunning iPhone/iPod Touch capability and we will be bringing the same level of functionality to other mobile platforms such as Android in future point releases of Gantry. Also as a side note, we have not provided iPad support because there is simply no need. The iPad is intended to render the web without 'custom' layout requirements, and it works fantastically with the existing 960 Grid system used by all Gantry-powered templates.

A few of the other great features we've added in version 3.0 of Gantry include a new Version Element that shows the installed version of Gantry and a notification if this is up-to-date and if not, a link to download the newest version. This makes it easier to stay on top of the Gantry releases. Another new and useful feature we've added in the core, is a new SmartLoad Feature. This feature causes only those images visible in the current view-port to load initially, and then as you scroll down and view more images, they are loaded dynamically. This smart-loading provides faster page loads, and also a nice effect as you view the rest of the web page. The last new feature I want to explain is the built-in support for the new Google Web Font service. This is a great new service offered by Google that allows you to use a collection of free web fonts in your new Gantry 3.0 based sites.

Changelog for Gantry 3.0

+ Added SmartLoad feature
+ Added Aliases element
+ Added Gradient & Gradient Preview element
+ Added Google Web Font support
+ Added Version Check element
+ Added image resizer feature for iPhone
+ Added iPhone support
+ Added per platform template page support
+ Added support for dynamic css and js files with query string
+ Added support for mootools 1.1.2 in older joomla versions (<= 1.5.14)
# Fix for php4 with gangtryurl.class and gantry.class
# Fix for Multiple copies of template showing up in uninstaller
# Fix for getParams not pulling cookie/session/menuitem/url modified params
# Fix for multiple includes of FlatFile
# Fix for caching dynamic params
# Fix for disabled fields do not reset to defaults
# Fix for default font stacks
# Fix for delete icon of presets for early templates
# Fix for splitmenu layout

Download Gantry 3.0

As always you can get the latest version of Gantry via Google Code.