Hey Paul,

I believe most of our customers do run our extensions with RT without an issue but this is actually a 2 way integration and one should never just rely on extension developers to fix conflicts. We will try our best to provide as much fixes if there are any conflicts at all

Thanks Mark. I appreciate that and the way you guys support your products. It is not a question to me of Stack products. I'm sticking with you for as long as you continue to provide good support. I'd like to get some customer feedback (RT customers) who have integrated to see if it is worth giving RT another shot or if I should just expect more of the same.

I am using Salient template from Rockettheme. It is Gantry5 and I have to admit that it was strange at the beginning but if you get used to it you will feel the power of Gantry5. Their documentation is very well done in my opinion because you can follow step by step all things shown in the template demo to learn how to work with the template.
I went for Yootheme templates for years but due to the lack of support I went for Rockettheme and I am satisfied with template and support. Especially the fact buying a lifetime license for single templates is a great thing in my opinion. On this way I do not have to renew my membership for an update of a template I bought.
I use the whole Easypackage with it and got no problems between the template and the Easy components yet.

@Paul to answer your main question, I've been a RocketTheme user for many years. If support was your main concern I can tell you from reading their forum the past two weeks for Gantry 5-based questions, I haven't seen any change for the better than what you've experienced in the past. It may quiet down over time but right now there's an influx of support requests if for no other reason than Gantry 5 is new and people have questions. You might find the support culture hasn't changed even if the framework has.

Coincidentally, I took a few days last week to review other templates with the advent of Gantry 5; it seemed like a good time to pause and look around (especially since the Requiem template introduces a problem/conflict with JQuery). So I looked around, albeit briefly, at sites including JoomlaRT, JoomlaShine, and Yootheme. For my aesthetic, Yootheme seemed best; they caught my eye in a performance test I saw at JoomlaSEO which showed them the winner.

I don't yet have objective data, but loading on my private server it's clear there's a big difference in load time between my old template (admittedly this was G4, I only loaded ES with G5 before abandoning it) and Yootheme is immediately apparent. I haven't had the need for any support and maybe my opinion will change later, but right now I'm happy with the Yootheme template (ease of use, aesthetic, and performance) and I'm hoping RokSprocket will run well there as well using EB as the content source (I'm pretty sure it will).

Thank you Eileen and Sabih. I also used YooTheme for years. I always liked their design but support was terrible. At times even antagonistic. A lot worse than RT that had a mostly useful peer forum but Yootheme for some reason decided to discourage use of a peer forum. This was especially problematic since I was an early adopter of ZOO and many things promised never materialized. So much time wasted on that! In both cases I just decided that it wasn't worth the frustration of paying these guys an annual tax to be treated with disdain (I've been treated better by the Government!) I'm glad I posted here before forking out more money.

Other template/extension clubs I have experience with are Joomlart, Gavick, Joomlashack, Templaza and JoomlaXTC. I gave up on Joomlart for a couple of years then went back. I'm not completely happy with the T3 overhead but for a quick implementation. Now that they are announcing that they are raising their prices I probably won't renew. Seems to me that quality has gone down and there are too many other options now to be raising prices. Prices should be going down not up. Gavick support was also really poor. The other 3 I have lifetime memberships but use them rarely. Templaza has some sleek designs but are always buggy and you have to work with their TZ Portfolio which they tweak for different purposes. Sometimes they do weird things with modules pulling data / relying upon some field in TZ Portfolio so if you hit a snag there is no logical way to figure it out. On the positive side their support staff WILL work through them if you are persistent.

Thanks for sharing this guys. In my opinion, a template without any frameworks at all would be the best In my humble opinion, frameworks would just over-complicate what is already complicated.

This is one of the reasons why we created Wanderers and Elegant (which will be released shortly) . They are running purely on css / html and there is close to no settings on the template at all

It may sound pretty bold to not have much settings at all but if you look at the glorious days of Joomla / Mambo, most template only comes with basic settings and it all boils down to the web developer if they actually want to customize the css codes to achieve specific layouts.

A template itself should just be as generic possible, once you add more extensive configurations like having multiple layouts, columns, rows there will be more processing involved and all of these are just unnecessary overheads.

Mark, I agree with you and really liked what you were doing with Wanderers. The framework thing is one of the reasons that I gave up on Joomlart. When Joomla 3 was being conceived one of the ideas was that Frameworks would become superfluous and unnecessary and this sounded great to me especially in light of SEO and google's (new at the time) emphasis on page speed. I still use these template clubs despite the frameworks because for a quick prototype they are great to use. Long term admin and growing of your site(s) is the problem. And going back to the earlier days of joomla, a lot of the conflict from the early developers was around this issue i.e. way too many calls.

Wanderers disappeared from my dashboard so I wasn't sure what you guys were doing. I played around a little with Elegant for ES in the last beta (RC4) but I didn't see much difference. I went through your blog post for insights but the pics didn't show much. Are you saying that Elegant will also be a site template like Wanderers ?

Hey Paul,

Wanderers are actually no longer being offered as free due to the number of support requests we have received. We had to charge a one time fee for it and if you are interested, you can always purchase it at http://stackideas.com/apps/item/3111-wanderers

Elegant would be a pretty similar theme to what you see on our demo site currently.

Mark, I remember testing Wanderers and had some difficulties with module positions for things like adding google ad positions to a site layout. I'm sure it is better now but I'd hate to invest in yet another template only to not use it. I see Elegant is now for sale as well and the price for Wanderers just increased! Why the different prices for these two?

Hey Paul,

Ah, sorry it looks like we have set the wrong price They are actually having the same price. What module positions that was lacking? Let us know and we'll add it in (Provided that you have a valid subscription of course)

I played around with Wanderers but am going to go with Elegant moving forward. Thank you.

Related to the module positions, I just posted about the bootstrap grid in the Elegant forum.

Hi Paul,

Thanks for the heads up on this one. As for the module position issue, we will reply on your other thread
Have a nice day!