Gantry 5 has taken another giant leap forward in its trek towards its first major stable release. Gantry 5 RC2 (Release Candidate 2) was released last Friday to positive review from our growing community. This release includes a multitude of bug fixes, as well as several additional features and enhancements that focus on making Gantry exceptionally user friendly.
Configurations Changed to Outlines
Throughout the CMS world, the term Configurations is used to describe a number of different things. In Gantry, we used the term to describe a set of layout, style, assignments, and particle settings. This is a major component of the Gantry framework, and we wanted to make sure it was free of confusion, especially when the word configuration can be used in so many different ways.
Our solution: Renaming Configurations to Outlines. We found that by doing this, we eliminate a lot of the potential confusion caused by new users.
Menu Improvements
Gantry 5's powerful Menu Editor is a menu customization powerhouse. Taking the menu defined by your CMS and enabling you to customize it, inject module instances and particles, as well as to define how it is displayed on your site, makes it a valuable addition to the Gantry framework. In RC2, we added a number of features to make it even better.
Individual submenus can now have custom widths set. You can now set the width of a parent's dropdown in rem, em, or px unit sizes, as well as auto which lets Gantry set the width of the dropdown automatically.
Individual menu items can now have CSS classes assigned to them. Previously, you were able to do this with injected module instances and particles, but now this functionality has been extended to CMS-provided menu items.
These features give you another level of control over your site's menus.
Easier Saving of Changes
Now, whenever you make changes to a particle, position, module instance, menu item, or virtually any other item, you have the option to Apply and Save your changes. This spares you the step of having to save your changes at the administrative panel level, making it easier to quickly change and check your changes.
For example, if you make a change to a particle in the Layout Manager, you can choose to have this change save immediately to the layout without having to save your layout, separately.
The Actions Bar in the Styles, Settings, and Layout administrative panels has also been duplicated and added to the bottom of the page. You don't have to scroll back to the top of the page to do things like save settings changes, load presets, and recompile CSS.
Layout Manager Improvements
One of the improvements suggested most by our community was the option to switch between preset layouts while maintaining the particles which are in place. There is now an option in the Load tool within the Layout Manager that enables you to preserve particles.
These are just a handful of the additions made in RC2. If you haven't already, please take a moment to take a look at Gantry 5 and try it for yourself. We have a free theme available called Hydrogen which you can use to check out these and many more features found in the all-new Gantry 5 framework.
Feel free to visit our project roadmap to learn more about Gantry 5 RC2, as well as plans for upcoming release(s) as development continues. You can also submit bug reports or feature addition suggestions on Github.
If you have any questions about Gantry 5 RC2, or would like to chat with other Gantry users, please visit our chat room on Gitter. You can also find detailed guides and tutorials in our documentation.