Back in my JoomlaMafia days, when I was writing as DrDigital, I built on Gantry. It was under my sites, under client sites, under a lot of late nights I still remember. Frameworks come and go, but that one was ours.
Then life moved on, and Gantry just sat there untouched for a long while. My 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. Freenode. That takes me back by itself.
Freenode is also where I learned how people actually ask for help. People from all over the world, asking in whatever English they had, and I answered them the way they talked. I still write that way. It never left me.
When I finally went back and looked at Gantry, the tracker had 577 open issues sitting there, and the framework would not run on the PHP everybody is on now. That bugged me. This was the framework under real work of mine, just sitting there broke. So I decided we are fixing every single one of them. Some on five, and the rest on six. We started with the blockers and got it running again. First came 5.6.6, then 5.7.0 on PHP 8.4.
Fixing it was not enough, though. I decided it needed a Gantry 6, and it needed to be released with an API in the core. I personally hate Zapier. In today’s world things need APIs, plain and simple.
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.
Matthew Murphy, DrDigital
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