Gantry WordPress Framework Review

The Gantry Framework

The Gantry layout manager is simple to use but powerful.

Gantry installs as a plugin in WordPress and requires the installation of the Timber plugin. The requirement of Timber isn’t listed on the download page and if you try to use Gantry without it you’ll see an error notice. Why not include the Timber library in the framework, or at least link to it from the download page? Seems like an odd choice and it certainly can raise an eyebrow the first time you install Gantry, but it’s easy enough to install.

Once you’ve got Gantry and Timber installed, you’ll need to install a theme. Unlike other frameworks, you don’t create a new template or theme from scratch. Instead, you download and install the free Hyrdrogen theme (or pay for one of their premium themes) and modify it to suit your needs. Although it’s possible to create your own Gantry theme, it’s not an easy process and RocketTheme even warns that it may “conflict with terms and conditions provided by some third-party theme providers.”

Once you have a theme installed you can start playing around with Gantry. The framework uses Outlines to control the layout of content and allows you to assign different Outlines to different types of content easily through the best designed assignment interface we’ve seen to date. You can assign an outline to pages or posts individually, in bulk, by category, by tags, and so on. It’s basically an improved version of Gantry 4’s assignment system and that’s a good thing.

Framework developers take note: this is how you build an assignments interface.

The “Base Outline” is the default and applies to anything that doesn’t have an override assigned. Most of the functionality of Gantry is found here – styles, settings, content defaults, layouts and assignments. Creating a new outline simply copies and overrides the Base Outline for any content that it is assigned to. It’s a system that works well and is easy to manage, but has a fatal flaw: there isn’t any inheritance. That means that you can’t set a row or particle (module) as global to work the same way throughout the site.

For example, let’s say you have a header. Pretty much every website does. You have your header setup just how you want in your Base Outline and then you create a new outline for your pages and another one for your posts. Those outlines are copies of the Base Outline, but if you change the header in any of them, it only affects that header. Not the others. This means you’ll need to make the change in every outline that contains that element every time you make a change.

The developers of Gantry are aware of this limitation and have been planning a fix, but as of now the issue is present and it’s a deal breaker. One of the selling points of any framework is the ability to easily build custom layouts quickly that are easy to manage and adjust and that simply isn’t going to be the case on a Gantry powered site until inheritance is added.

Another weakness of Gantry is responsive design. Although the Hydrogen theme is responsive out of the box, customizing that is going to require some work. Let’s say you have a header for desktop that doesn’t quite work on mobile. You’ll have to create a second header – in each outline – and use CSS classes to hide one on desktops and and make the other visible on mobile. Simple toggle buttons integrated into the options for sections, rows, and pixels would be a much better solution.

The hits keep coming. Want to add a new section to your layout? Code it. Need to export your design to another theme? Not possible; if you switch to a different Gantry theme, all of your work stays in your existing theme. Gantry includes a menu editor that could use some polish and feels like an after thought compared to the layout manager and other areas. It does add the ability to customize the look and feel of the menu more than you can do without code in the default WordPress menu editor, but it needs some work to be more intuitive.

Gantry Templates

Gantry itself is free and open source, but you’ll need a theme to actually use it. You can download and install Hydrogen for free which gives you a simple theme to build off of but not much more. The developers are planning to create a new default theme and an interactive demo site, but that’s probably down the road a bit.

You can also purchase a premium theme that uses Gantry 5 from RocketTheme. These come with custom particles and additional sections, but are functionally the same as Hydrogen. The premium themes also contain a lot of “Simple Content” particles – basically fancy text blocks – which may make things a bit more laborious from a design standpoint.

In a way the simplicity of Hydrogen is a strength. It helps you understand Gantry without bogging you down with someone else’s idea of how a site should be designed. It doesn’t come with many pre-made outlines and the presets are just different color schemes but that’s probably enough to get most people started in Gantry. To us, Hydrogen feels like a stop-gap measure; something between a fully fleshed out free theme and the ability to create a theme from scratch.

Conclusions

RocketTheme has a lot of experience with frameworks and it is evident in their latest offering. Gantry 4 was a solid effort used for years by people all around the world and Gantry 5 is a worthy follow-up that just isn’t complete yet. Once inheritance is added, the user interface becomes a little less dependent on CSS classes, and they add the ability to create a theme from scratch within the graphical interface of the framework, Gantry is going to be tough to beat.

In our benchmarks Gantry had a very strong showing; it even topped the default WordPress theme in page load times for the About Us page and the homepage. This shows that the code is clean, well optimized, and should scale well on larger sites. We’re looking forward to future updates.