Design powerful, interactive, and easy-to-use Joomla theme with open source template builder. Gantry framework boosts page response time and performance.

Joomla Gantry

Overview

We’ve already published some articles on topics such as Joomla Template Development Guide For The Beginners, Drupal Mautic Integration To Automate Lead Nurturing, Integrate Mautic & Joomla For Digital Marketing Automation, and more, so we will concentrate on creating the theme with Gantry Framework in this guide. Gantry framework is an open source template builder that is used to build responsive and enterprise-level layouts for Joomla and WordPress. Open source community has developed a wide range of content management systems that offer rich-featured theme-building capabilities. Gantry framework for Joomla is one of the most popular theming frameworks. Building an eye-catching and engaging website is a vital component of any business. However, the time requires to build or modify such websites is another important aspect.

Therefore, the Joomla Gantry framework provides provisions to speed up the layout development process. Above all, it also eliminates the compulsion of being equipped with coding or programming skills. On the other hand, the installation process of such frameworks is quite easy and simple. They are available in the form of plugins for top most content management systems such as WordPress and Joomla. In this Gantry framework tutorial, we will cover the following points:

What is Gantry framework for Joomla?

Gantry is a free and open source theming framework for Joomla. Gantry is a fast and flexible web theme framework. It is built on a 12 column, 960 Grid System layout that is based on Twitter Bootstrap. In addition, it is 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 design the site quickly instead of writing code. It is based on a text file configuration (YAML), so it is easy to edit these text files. Moreover, this open source theme builder is available for WordPress and Joomla. Joomla Gantry gives complete control to the users regarding content and data. There are features to configure this free theme builder and integrate it with third-party applications. Further, it is highly extensible and users can extend its functionality as per their requirements.

As far as the theme building options are concerned, this theme framework provides a number of styles and designs in UI elements that include Google fonts, toggles, color-chooser, image-chooser, prefix labels, sliders textPlus with suffix, and many more. In fact, there is support for Right-to-Left languages such as Arabic, Farsi, and some more. Users can control the size of the blocks and can design any layout with the help of a grid system. Gantry is highly secure and lets AJAX-powered non-intrusive growl-style notifications for events. Moreover, there are many typographical features, JavaScript control, ability to set parameters via URL, Cookie, Session and Presets.

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 Gantry Theme

In this section of the Gantry framework tutorial, we will install this theme framework(Gantry).

  • 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 the current theme and use it as a template for the creation of your new theme.

  • Download, unzip and open the Hydrogen theme.
  • Change names of files and directories.
  • Let’s say your new theme name is “mytheme”, so replace the hydrogen with mytheme in files and directories.
  • Search files for the theme name. Find and Replace the 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

This is the end of this Gantry framework tutorial. In this blog post, we have gone through the introduction of the Joomla Gantry framework, its features, and the installation steps for Joomla content management. This template builder is open source, free, and comes with a vibrant support community that is alive and very responsive to bugs and discussions. In addition, this blog post can really help you if you have a website built using Joomla or WordPress. The theme is a central part of every website and attracts visitors with a beautiful UI. You can create a Joomla template free with or without any theme framework but you can create a highly interactive and responsive Joomla template with the Gantry framework. It would help you to save development costs & time.

Gantry is one of the best Joomla template framework, so you can enjoy the true power of it by consuming features like layout manager, visual menu editor, SCSS/LESS support, theme inheritance, and many more. Further, there are many other tutorial and comparison blog posts and open source products that you can explore. All the listed products are free and come with self-hosting capabilities. Finally, containerize.com is in a consistent process of writing blog posts on further latest open source products. Therefore, stay in touch with this Content Management category for the latest updates.

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