The RocketTheme team has been hard at work on bringing Gantry 5 to WordPress. A lot of this progress has been made in connecting Gantry 5's own Menu and Layout solutions to the features baked in to WordPress.
One of our primary goals with Gantry 5 is to make the framework work with the content management system, rather than against it. In order for this to work, we have to find a solution that brings the best features of WordPress and Gantry 5's powerful feature set together in a way that is seamless and intuitive.
Current Development Goals
This week, we made a lot of progress in this regard. Here are a few of the goals we are working on during the next week:
- Seamlessly integrate WordPress' own menu system with Gantry 5's menu editor, taking into account WordPress' unique feature set.
- Extend the possibilities of WordPress' widgets system to fully utilize the power of Gantry 5's Layout Manager.
- Create a Content administrative panel that enables users to easily configure style and display options.
- Port WordPress' theme content structure to Twig.
- Testing, bug fixing, and other minor adjustments for a smoother user experience.
You can follow Gantry 5's development progress on GitHub. If you have any questions, suggestions, or feedback, you can chat with the development team (as well as other members of the user community) in Gitter chat.
Some Things to Look Forward to in Gantry 5 for WordPress
Gantry 5 for WordPress features dozens of major feature updates when compared to Gantry 4. With each of these development update posts, we would like to take a moment to share some of the new features you can look forward to in Gantry 5.
Non-destructive Theming
One thing we want to make clear is that Gantry 5 does not in any way interfere with WordPress' content system. It takes what WordPress presents and enhances it with additional styling. This ensures that your content remains exactly the way you created it. This includes any menus, posts, and pages you have created.
For example, if you add items to your main menu in the Gantry 5 Menu Editor, your additions do not in any way affect how WordPress sees or handles the menu. These additions (either particles, widget instances, etc.) are simply added during page rendering by the framework.
Particles
What you can add to your site in addition to theme-specific styling is content by way of Particles. Particles are simple blocks of content that consist of two files, a Twig file and a YAML file. The Twig file is the blueprint of the particle. It determines what is included, which CSS classes to use and where, etc.
The YAML file gives you the ability to create fields which are easily accessed within the Gantry 5 administrator so you can set variables for your Particle. For example, a particle that displays an image and some text might include fields for the image source, a text field for the text content, and possibly a field or two to enable you to assign CSS classes and/or background/text colors.
Particles are a lot like widgets, but we like to think they're a lot simpler to create and use within your site. For example, adding a widget to an area of your page can be done with a click and a drag, where creating a widget position, then adding the widget to that position, requires additional steps.
Find out more about Particles and Gantry 5 by visiting our official documentation.
Layout Manager
Gantry 5's Layout Manager is one of the biggest new features of the framework. It is a one-stop-shop for arranging the elements of your page(s), with virtually unlimited potential for customization.
You can add a practically limitless number of horizontal rows to each page section, as well as configure the relative width of specific items in these rows with drag-and-drop simplicity.
Want to give your site a sidebar that takes up exactly 42% of the width of the page? You can do this in seconds with the Layout Manager.
Additionally, you can add widget positions to your page without ever having to open a single code editor. Just drag-and-drop the Widget Position particle where you want it to appear in your page, give it a name (key) and it'll be available for you to assign widgets to as needed.
You can find out more about Gantry 5's Layout Manager by visiting our official documentation.