Blog

InspireTheme Turns Three

Hey guys, it is a very special moment for us because we just hit a big milestone in our history - InspireTheme turned 3!

Now, most of you might have noticed that we slowed down our operation in the second half of 2018. I believe that we owe you a more detailed explanation of what we were doing and what we have planned for 2019...

Well, we are not the only company that slowed down in 2018, not at all. If you take a closer look at the other companies you will notice that the whole Joomla industry slowed down in waiting and preparing for Joomla 4. And this is normal because the companies are not sure what will change in Joomla 4, which extensions will be updated for Joomla 4 and which ones will be abandoned... in general, the more products developed and released now the more work the companies will have to update them and release their Joomla 4 version.

So, why did we slowed down in the second half of 2018?

As you guys know, we are a very small team. For us, the release of a new major Joomla version means a lot of planning and a lot of work in order to make our products compatible.
Therefore, we decided that it will be best if we do not release any more new templates so we can have less work when we update them for Joomla 4.

What were we doing the last few months?

I, personally, took the time to polish my JavaScript skills and more precisly, to learn React :)
React is a JavaScript library for building user interfaces. Basically, you fetch data from a RESTful API and visualize it on the front-end. And React allows you to do some awesome things quite easily.
So, why am I saying this? Because a RESTful API (Web Services) will be introduced in Joomla 4!
This will allow us to develop some awesome products and be one of the first companies that use React with Joomla! So stay tuned :)

The other thing we were doing was... looking into UIkit v3 :)
Yes, we will be switching to UIkit v3! We made some initial developments and tests and everything looks very promising!
I cannot give you any ETA, there is still a lot of work to be done, but UIkit v3 is coming!
The only thing I can say at this point is that we will do the switch after we release the Joomla 4 version of our templates (more details below).

What are our plans for 2019?

Well, we have quite a lot of tasks planned for 2019. Here is the list and then I will go through each and every task in more details:

  1. Release the Joomla 4 version of our templates.
  2. Switch to UIkit v3.
  3. Update our website.
  4. Start releasing new products again.

Release the Joomla 4 version of our templates - this one is obvious and has the highest priority. Unfortunately, we cannot start working on it until the Joomla 4 version of the Gantry 5 framework is released. We need to wait for Joomla 4 Beta to be released first.

Switch to UIkit v3 - this is a really tricky one. Let me explain why we need to do the swicth after the Joomla 4 version of our templates is released.
We do believe that it is very important for everyone to be able to update to Joomla 4, while it is really not that important and/or urgent to switch from UIkit v2 to UIkit v3. Therefore we want to make the process of updating to Joomla 4 as simple as possible so you guys do not have to do any manual work. You will just need to update the Gantry 5 framework and the template and that's it.
While switching to UIkit v3 will require some manual work for most of you. If you have some particle files (Twig) in your custom/particles folder then you will need to replace those with the new ones (the UIkit v3 ones). We will include detailed instructions as well as a short video in the "Update" section in the documentation of each and every template.

Update our website - we need to do this mostly because of the "Download Manager" extension that we use. It is no longer developed and supported (and it is not PHP7 compatible) so we need to switch to another extension.
And we are also using an old version of EasyDiscuss and PayPlans so we will be updating those as well.

Start releasing new products again - believe me guys, we want to do it more than you do. But first we need to release the Joomla 4 version of our existing templates and we need to switch to UIkit v3.

So, that's it. I believe that we will continue to work on switching to UIkit v3 (we basically need to re-write our particles). We will do as much work as we can so when the time comes we can quickly do the switch.
Then we will continue with updating our website while we wait for Joomla 4 to be released :)

Celebrating InspireTheme's birthday with a 25% discount

Like every year, we have a 25% discount offer for all of you who want to join our community and for those of you who want to renew their expired subscription.
And for those of you who want to renew/extend their active subscription - you can combine your "Loyalty Discount" with this one and renew your subscription at an almost half price!
Just add the following promo code on the Checkout page and the price will be adjusted accordingly:

ITBDAY25

Have in mind that the above promo code will be valid for 10 days only, until 21st of January :)

That's all for now guys. Thank you once again for being part of our community and stay tuned!

Become an insider | Subscribe to our Newsletter
Subscribe to our mailing list and stay up-to-date with all our awesome releases, latest updates and amazing discount offers!