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Written by: Matthew Murphy

Category: Blog

Published: 02 November 2026

Hits: 34

So I need to tell you about Gantry because most of you that been reading this site forever already know we used Gantry back in the day. All them JoomlaMafia sites, my sites, client sites, Gantry was under a lot of it.

Then it just sat there. Nobody was touching it. Our old friend Andy Miller closed down RocketTheme and Grav went stale and Gantry went stale right with it. Word was someone from the old freenode IRC server took it over. I don't know if you remember freenode but I do, I lived in that Joomla channel.

That channel is a big part of why this site sounds like this site. The people in there was from all over the world and most of them was speaking broken English, because English is not their first language. And that is how they was asking Google and Bing and Yahoo too, in that same broken English. But the answers on the internet was all written in polished English so their questions did not match the answers and they could not find nothing. So they came to IRC and asked us and we answered them the way they talked. I wrote this site the same way on purpose. So if my grammar is not perfect, good, it is not supposed to be. I am writing it how people actually ask. And now people is asking AI the same way they used to ask us in that channel.

And there is another part to it most people never got. My writing on the page was like that and my metadata was a mix of both. The meta descriptions and the keywords, some of it I wrote in that same broken way people was asking it, and some of it proper grammar too, both of them in there together. So it matched how people typed it and it still had the proper words the search engines was looking for. Two different jobs but both in the metadata. That is why I built some of the plugins and modules I built back then, they showed you what was missing in your metadata, because everybody was forgetting that part and it matters.

Anyways. I went back to look at Gantry and the tracker had 577 issues sitting there open and it would not run on the PHP everybody is on now. So we fixed the stuff that was broke. And I decided we are not stopping at the broke stuff neither. We are fixing every one of them issues, every single one. Some of them is getting fixed on five and the rest of them is getting fixed on six. We shipped 5.6.6 and then 5.7.0 and it runs on PHP 8.4 now. But just fixing the old one was not enough for me.

It needed a Gantry 6. And it needed to be released with a API built in the core. I personally hate Zapier. In today's world things need APIs, that is just how it is. A site with no API is a site you can't do nothing with unless you sit there and click everything by hand.

There is no API for a wife or girlfriend tho. 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.

DrDigital