About 2 months ago, Anthony from JoomlaBamboo buzzed me on Skype and said “I've just looked at the new version of T3 and I think it is absolutely amazing. I'm considering moving to that as our framework and I just wanted to discuss that with you.”
In the past I have had several similar chats with well known template providers about T3. I had the same discussions with Gavick as well as other ThemeForest developers who wanted to turning to T3 v1 and T3 v2. But this time, it is a bit different. We have reached now a momentum to do something big as a community, something that we, Anthony, me and a few awesome Joomla folks, talked about 8 months ago.
Anthony and the JoomlaBamboo team announced a few days ago to move to T3v3 and now it’s time that I officially announce on the future of the T3v3 Framework. In his blog post, Anthony covered some basic info about T3. Here I will address 2 questions:
- Why did we develop T3v3 8 months ago?
- What would the future of T3v3 look like?
8 years and 8 months...
In the past 8 years we learned a lot by designing, building, failing and changing our templates and extensions over and over, month over month and year over year. In the last 8 months we iteratively worked on T3v3 to bring you something different, something that we believe we can do best — design & templating. The result of 8 years learning.
Ok if you are new here, T3v3 is the 3rd generation of our T3 Framework. T3v3 is not an upgrade of T3v1 or T3v2, it has been totally rewritten from scratch.
There are 3 main reasons why we have dropped the hard work of 5 years.
Bootstrap
Joomla made a big jump with Joomla 3.0, especially with the new template system including Bootstrap (BT). BT is a strong front-end framework and it will be your friend or your enemy. You have to either keep your grid layout, typography, css/html code or drop them to use what Bootstrap offers.
RWD (responsive web design)
Before 2011, the RWD was rarely known but with the boom of the smartphones and tablets, people are spending more and more time with those mobile devices to access the internet. RWD is no longer a trend, it is a must have. Every Joomla template has to be responsive from now on.
Our T3v1 & T3v2 templates are mobile but they are not responsive. With browser detection the template loads different layouts and content for different browser clients. RWD is different, the template uses the same layout and the same content. Bootstrap is a big help and time saver for fast RWD development and we didn’t want to drag the “mobile” view from T3v2 into T3v3.
LESS Development
Less is the new best friend if you decide to hangout with Bootstrap. Coding with LESS can help you to save 30%-50% of your time to develop your template.
With Bootstrap, RWD, LESS the way to make a template for Joomla is now entering a new area, the framework must be lighter, but maximize Bootstrap's power, especially it's base CSS. It's the perfect time to rebuild our T3 foundation.
THE FUTURE OF T3...
After weeks of exciting discussions with Anthony as well as with few other key Joomla developers. Getting different advices and opinions, today without further hesitation I announce that the T3 framework will become an independent project. All versions of T3 (T3v1, T3v2 and T3v3) are licensed under GPL. So what does this mean for the community?
There will be no difference in terms of distribution or usage, but it will make a difference how the T3 framework will evolve.
Looking for Co-Authors & Co-Developers
We will invite everyone to join as a co-author or co-developer of the T3 framework. Co-developers are the one with read-write permissions to the main repository. The new co-author/developer must be approved by 2/3 of the existing co-authors.
Bug Fixes, Change Requests & New Features
Obvious bug fixes will be accepted. New feature & major change commits need 2/3 or greater percentage of votes to be accepted to get into the main repository.
T3 Home, Documentation & Support
- The main project wil be hosted at Github.com Instead of a repository running under JoomlArt, it will be a community project initiated by JoomlArt & JoomlaBamboo. The new project URL is https://github.com/t3framework/
- The current home of T3 is at http://t3.joomlart.com, it will be moved to a new home at http://www.t3-framework.org (available soon) This will be the place for the documentation.
- Google Group to be live at https://groups.google.com/forum/#!forum/t3fw (all co-authors will be the co-admin of this group)
I don’t know yet how strong and how fast we can grow this project. It depends a lot on the next steps of the project. I just have a unique and ultimate goal: an unifying framework for Joomla 3.x that I mentioned in beginning of the post.
Let’s end this post with a quote from Vio
“It would be great to unite all the innovations, ideas and experience in one place”
This amazing momentum won’t be achieved, if we don’t act now. Let’s ignite together Joomla!