Gantry 5.5.20 is scheduled for release 7/23/2025

[gteigland]

We sincerely appreciate everyone’s patience during this transition period. After thorough testing and review of the proposed development changelog — see here — we are preparing to release these updates to the official GitHub release branch and Gantry.org on 7/23/2025. Shortly thereafter, they will be published to both the WordPress and Joomla repositories.

We remain fully committed to maintaining the long-term stability of Gantry. If you encounter any issues, please report them on GitHub so we can address them promptly. Our development team continues to prioritize reliability and actively resolves bugs to ensure a smooth experience for all users.

[trendskater]

Will Gantry remain functional for Joomla 3?

[gteigland]

Hi @trendskater Older Gantry versions (e.g. 5.4.x) will keep working on Joomla 3, but new Gantry versions will only support Joomla 4/5. Anyone staying on Joomla 3 must stick to their current Gantry version.

[N8Solutions]

@gteigland Thanks for the update and release timeline.

Will the upcoming 5.5.20 release require any modifications to existing RocketTheme templates to maintain compatibility?
If not, should we expect that the future Joomla 6–compatible version will require changes to those templates?

It would be helpful to know in advance if template adjustments are going to be necessary, either now or with the next major Joomla release.

[gteigland]

@N8Solutions Great question and I don't have a great answer for you. I do not know how this will affect other Rockettheme templates. We took over Gantry to keep the framework moving forward and then making sure the 2 base templates Helium and Hydrogen will continue to work on new versions. All of our testing for themes is only based on those two. Rockettheme built great stuff but we did not "inherit" Rockettheme membership but only gantry.org If clients need help we can fix any of those bugs on a case by case basis. Fill out this form here: https://tiger12.com/gantry/.

[N8Solutions]

EDIT

As of writing this (2025-07-20_01:40). The current Gantry 5 CI Build is still compatible with RocketTheme's Gantry 5 compatible Joomla templates. I recommend caution though, as I only tried 6 different templates at random out of the 46 that were available before they closed down.

@gteigland Thanks for the honest reply, I appreciate it.

I understand you only took over Gantry and not RocketTheme. I asked because, like many others, I have clients still using RocketTheme templates, and I know there are a lot of users who may not be technically inclined enough to realize that if their site breaks after updating Gantry 5, it could be due to template incompatibility. A little advance notice could prevent a lot of frustration as would a note about reverting to the previous version to get the site back up and running quickly.

I plan to test the 5.5.20 update on a staging domain, but it might be worth running a few basic checks on some of the more commonly used RT templates. Even if they’re not officially supported, a lot of people are still using them in production. If an update introduces breaking changes, having a clear note in the release announcement or under Troubleshooting in the docs would be really helpful. Even a simple “known issues” list would go a long way.

When Gantry 5.5 was released, Mark (MrT) posted a guide on the RT forums about how to prepare a site before updating. I saved it and included it in my copy of the Gantry 5 docs here:
👉 https://gantry-docs.n8solutions.org/gantry5/troubleshooting/gantry-5.5.x-release

That guide is still relevant, especially for users upgrading from older Gantry versions. If you’re open to including it in the official documentation, I’d be happy to send it over.

Also, it’s good to know that you’re open to fixing RocketTheme-related issues on a case-by-case basis, though I assume that support wouldn’t be complimentary. And while it’s helpful to know the option exists, a simple doc explaining the basics of how to update an RT template to work with newer Gantry 5 releases would go a long way for the community. It would just need to be general advice about where to look and what to change in order to update the template as each template, while similar, will still be unique. There will be people like me who want to handle it ourselves, and others who would simply prefer to pay someone to take care of it.

Just some things to consider. Thanks again for your continued work on Gantry. Looking forward to the release.

– Michael

[gteigland]

@N8Solutions Thanks for much for your suggestions and willingness to help. Also for your testing and confirmation above. very helpful!

Yes please send it over. Ill add it to the documentation before Wednesday. You can email it or just attach it to this thread. Ill also add notes in the release of which templates this was tested for and note that anyone using the updates creates a backup.

If we had taken over rockettheme and received those memberships than definitely we would have supported those other themes. But we didn't and we can't just put that time into it at no cost. We are doing work now with a client that used Gavick themes on their sites. A very popular theme framework a few years ago. They too closed up shop and we had to convert all their themes to Gantry. We found a pretty painless way to do it.

If it were me and I wanted a long term solution I would transition those other themes to Gantry - Helium. It would be pretty painless for us to do with minimal resources. What we basically do is:

1. Load theme
2. Duplicate the base outline and other outlines to the new theme
3. Route Modules to the new theme positions
4. Download old override CSS file and base theme css file and load it using Gantry's css attachment feature to the Helium Theme settings.
5. Make final changes to a new css file if there are any issues.

This worked quite well for us on the Gavick to Gantry transition and upgrade to Joomla. Going from Gantry to Gantry would be even easier. My guess is we could probably do this in 2-3 days of work depending on theme. If anyone needs this help tiger12.com/gantry. In our other Gavick projects we coordinated with the client so they did some of the work and we filled in the rest. It kept the costs down.

The only issue would be any Rok Modules or plugins. I would replace those as well.

We are going to be here a long time and with our expansion plans of Gantry, it will be a framework you can count on in the far future.

[N8Solutions]

@gteigland Here is the code for the Github I referenced above.
gantry-5.5.x-release.txt

Thanks for the rundown on how you converted the Gavick themes to Gantry 5.

I know RocketTheme stopped supporting "Rok" components quite a while ago. All the latest versions of their templates that were available for Gantry 5 before they shut down did not use any "Rok" components. I someone is still using a J3 site with an old RocketTheme template, then it is highly likely they will be using those, but with any newer templates, those were deprecated a long time ago.

Besides the Helium template, I installed the templates listed below using their template files and did not use their associated Rocket Launcher file for installing Joomla.
Callisto v1.7.0
Clarity v1.5.0
Horizon v1.5.0
Koleti v1.5.0
Requiem v1.5.0
Zenith v1.5.0

The home page for each template worked fine on Joomla v5.3.2 even after disabling the Backward Compatibility plugin.

[pixleight]

Tagging this as a patch release (5.5.19 => 5.5.20) while including major breaking changes like PHP 8.1.0 minimum requirement is a significant misstep and doesn't follow semver conventions, IMO: https://github.com/gantry/gantry5/blob/develop/CHANGELOG.md#5520

I think it would have been more appropriate as a 6.0.0 major release.

[gteigland]

@pixleight Thanks for you comment. You do have a really good point. We recently took over Gantry and was finishing up prior work. My guess is the thougth was to keep Gantry 5 naming in line . That way when then next version comes out Gantry 6 then that upgrade would carry the same version number. However you bring up a good point. Ill keep that in mind moving forward.

[genr8r]

For anyone checking this we recently discovered Gantry 5.2.20 breaks our site running rt_salient.

We had backups so no big deal to rollback. There is a js dependency (https://github.com/leafo/sticky-kit if I recall correctly) that needs updating. We can handle that internally, but I thought I would drop the note here in the event it is helpful for others.

Spitballing a bit... is there somewhere in the Gantry repo that could track these breaks? Or do you have any news on what is happening (if anything) with the RT templates. Any chance RT/Andy would open source them? I know there are some copywrited assets in them but the rocketlaunchers already excluded those to the best of my knowledge - IANAL.