Why We Bet on Gantry 6

We used Gantry back in the JoomlaMafia days. It was the framework under the sites we built, the one we reached for when a site had to look right and hold together. So when people ask why Built Not Begged is betting on Gantry now, the honest answer is that we never really left. We just watched it sit.

And sit it did. Our old friend Andy Miller closed down RocketTheme. Grav went stale, and Gantry went stale right along with it. Word was someone from the old freenode IRC server took it over, but the work was not moving the way it needed to.

When we went back and looked, the tracker had 577 open issues sitting there, and the framework would not run on modern PHP. So we made the call: every one of those issues gets fixed. Some of the fixes land on Gantry 5, and the rest land on Gantry 6. We started with the stuff standing in its way. Our fork shipped Gantry 5.6.6, and then Gantry 5.7.0 running on PHP 8.4, with the PHP 8.5 work right behind it.

Fixing the old framework was not the finish, though. We decided what it really needed was a Gantry 6, and it needed to be released with an API built into the core, not bolted on later. Matthew personally hates Zapier. In today’s world things need APIs. An API is how sites, tools, and agents talk to each other without a human clicking through screens.

That is why the Template Club catalog ships the way it does: the designs are by Built Not Begged, on a Gantry 6 framework. One maker, one framework, and an API under it, so what we sell can be installed, updated, and checked by our own tooling. That is the bet this store is making.

There is no API for a wife or girlfriend. And us men don’t have one either. Maybe if both did we could communicate better.

I can’t fix humans not having a API but I can fix our sites to having one.