With this months template we are rolling out the next major version of our Gantry framework, Gantry 2.5. All along we have really tried to make Gantry be as template neutral and as flexible as possible for any of our own templates, or any custom templates you develop with it. With Gantry 2.5 we are trying to make it very easy to upgrade Gantry itself without touching the template. We are also providing even more power to your gantry template installs with some enhanced control of how you apply template stylings to your Menu Items. There are even some expanded advanced levels of overrides for those of you developing your own templates based on Gantry.
Gantry 2.5 keeps all the old features of the pervious versions of Gantry and has some good bug fixes for those features, but it also brings several new major features to the table.
Gantry as a Stand Alone Library.
One of the first things we wanted to do with Gantry 2.5 was split the Gantry framework itself out from the template and make it a library. We found that most of the fixes and enhancements we were doing were to the Gantry framework itself. What having Gantry as a stand alone library does is allows you to update gantry separately from the template itself. This also means that you can have multiple templates all using the same Gantry library and update them all at once.
To do a stand alone library in Joomla 1.5 we have to implement it as a Joomla component. When Joomla 1.6 comes along there will be a way to install libraries separate so Gantry will become a true Joomla library.
Getting set up for the stand alone Gantry library is very easy. If you are installing the a template that uses it all you have to do is install the templates bundle file. This includes the template and the stand alone Gantry lib and will install both at the same time. You can install the gantry_joomla_framework file separately just like any other component if you want just the library.
Breaking up is ... well not so hard after all.
There is also an easy path to upgrading older gantry templates. There are two things you need to do in order to update a template you do not want to overwrite with an updated template installer.
First we have a Gantry Bootstrap (gantry_joomla_bootstrap.zip) which takes the place of everything in the templates lib/gantry directory. Just replace the old templates lib/gantry with the bootstraps files. This will point to the new stand alone library and should work transparently.
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