Design powerful, interactive, and easy to use Joomla theme with open source Gantry framework to boost page loading speed and for optimum performance.
We’ve already created a post for creating responsive templates in Joomla, so we will concentrate on creating the theme with Gantry Framework in this guide. Gantry is a theming framework and easy to use for both the developers and end users. Gantry has a drag & drop feature that helps users to customize the theme quickly because GUI functionality helps you designing of site quickly instead of writing code. It is based on a text file configuration (YAML), so it is easy to edit these text files. In this blog post, we will cover the following sections:
Installing Gantry Framework:
- Download Gantry from http://gantry.org/downloads
- Navigate to Extensions -> Extensions Manager -> Install and select the Choose File button. Locate the downloaded zip and click Upload & Install.
- You can see Gantry extensions under Extensions Manager. Make sure that all of Gantry extensions are enabled.
Installing a Gantry Theme:
- Go to Extensions -> Extensions Manager -> Install. Select the Choose File button, locate the downloaded zip and click Upload & Install button. Gantry template will appear in the Template Manager.
- Go to Extensions -> Template Manager, select the gantry checkbox and make it default template for your site.
Create Theme with Gantry:
A very easy way to build the Gantry theme, take current theme and use it as a template for creation of your new theme.
- Download, unzip and open Hydrogen theme.
- Change names of files and directories.
- Let’s say your new theme name is “mytheme”, so replace hydrogen with mytheme in files and directories.
- Search files for the theme name. Find and Replace old theme name with new one like “hydrogen to mytheme, Hydrogen to Mytheme & HYDROGEN to MYTHEME”.
- Zip theme, install it and that’s it.
Conclusion:
The theme is a central part of every website and attracts visitors with a beautiful UI. You can create a theme with or without any theming framework but you can create highly responsive and interactive themes using the Gantry framework. It would help you to save development cost & time. Gantry is one of the best theme designing frameworks, so you can enjoy true power of it by consuming features like layout manager, visual menu editor, SCSS/LESS support, Theme inheritance and many more.
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