david meissner

Notes on Grav

Date: []

A few notes on Grav, starting with a quick summary:

Positives

  1. Simple to install and operate.
  2. Uses Markdown for formatting content.
  3. The default Quark theme has a clean look, with options for building elaborate Modular pages.
  4. There is a reasonable collection of themes available that look suitable for a variety of types of sites.
  5. There is a reasonable collection of plugins available for adding features to a site.
  6. Grav provides pre-built “skeletons” that flesh out specific themes with sample content to help with learning the system.

Concerns

  1. Grav requires knowledge of Twig in order to make full use of the system. It doesn’t seem too hard to pick up the basics of Twig, but this adds to the learning curve.
  2. Many of the community-contributed themes and plugins are several years old and may not be actively maintained.
  3. Grav doesn’t seem to have a large user community, making it harder to get reliable support.

Details

I use Joomla for another site that I manage, but it wasn’t a good fit for the type of personal site I want to build. I like Joomla, but for my own site I wanted something simpler in both technology and appearance. I’ll write a future post about my experiences with Joomla.

Grav is a file-based CMS, no database required. It’s very easy to install, and there is good documentation available. The default Quark theme produced a clean look that was close to what I wanted, and I got closer with the Hypertext add on theme from Alejo Grigera Sutro, and the water-light style from kognise.

Grav has a number of plugins that extend the capabilities of the CMS. The admin plugin adds an administrator interface for configuring and managing the site. The site can be managed and content added without the admin plugin, by editing text files and running terminal commands, but the plugin makes site management much easier.

Grav has a modest collection of add-on themes from outside developers. I only tested a few of them before settling on the Hypertext theme, so I can’t say much about them. But from the screen shots and the ones I tried out, it looks like there is a range of visual styles to choose from.

Grav’s Features pages says: “A simple and intuitive interface allows even non-technical people to create content and manage key aspects of Grav”. This is true to a point, but as you start reading the documentation and discussions on their forum, you’ll find that you need to be more familiar with Twig and CSS to make the most of Grav’s features.

Grav is working well for me so far, but I’m still looking into other possibilities including static site generators. As I add more blog posts and think about other style changes, I’ll have to decide if I want to go deeper into learning Twig.