Shape 5

I appreciate the extreme flexibility and customization the Vertex foundation provides in templates.

Is it possible to develop a template that is much less graphical, with -- perhaps -- less scripting, for use on sites that are content intensive?

Most of the work I do is with historical/genealogical non-profit sites, where massive amounts of transcribed text (books, historical records, and more) are on-line.  I have, for example, a 250-page autobiography from the 19th Century in one content article, in which I've used Joomla's native page breaks and table of contents to control display.

It would be tremendous to have a plain template, with some Vertex customization controls, that I could assign to those categories in order to keep the page overhead down.

Hello,

This is already possible. If you download the Vertex Template this is extremely minimal and fast loading as there is minimal styling and extensions. You can also disable anything you don't need in Vertex directly in the Template Manager such as Multibox to increase loading speed.

Thanks!  I'll have a go at it.

Yes like Mike said you can disable features you don't want but thanks for the suggestion to create a super simple template layout.  We'll keep this in mind for future releases.