Future/truth of Grav vs. other CMS

I really want to like Grav but it’s starting to be impossible =( More I try to use it more I find things that are broken. There is lots of plugins and themes listed but when you try to use them you will notice that this plugin or theme doesn’t work anymore or they don’t work together.
Grav seems to be pretty abandoned project which is really sad because it could be something really good but now it seems to be just a lists of features (plugins, themes and so on) but in reality most of them are outdated, broken or they just don’t work in reality.
I don’t want to go back to wordpress but it looks like that I have to because there doesn’t see to be any support or community with grav.

Repeating same topic will not fix the situation. You are only polluting the forum when duplicating the topics (especially your own and even more so, when it was answered already)

Well I guess that that answer tell more about Grav that you wanted.
Instead of trying to fix problems which I said you decided to attack against me.
There is old saying “Don’t shoot the messenger” which is try to remember and not attack against to somebody and more think what they said or wrote.

I’m sorry you see this as an attack. And I don’t really understand who’s message you’re relaying. May I ask what’s your intent of duplicating the topic? What kind of outcome do you expect with such action?

@Whig, @Karmalakas, Shall we take a breath and pause the conversation for a moment? This does not lead to a solution.

Yep I vote for taking a breath and pause and I really don’t want to argue I just want to make Grav CMS better.

@Whig

In my opinion Grav is very much alive, I don’t think he’s dead at all. It is true that there are plugins and themes that are outdated, but they can still serve as the basis for creating new ones. I myself have proposed to maintain some themes, offering to the community what I can humbly offer. I’m not an expert programmer, more like a designer, and that’s why I think there should be more help on certain topics like: How to create shortcodes or plugins (there’s some help on this in the Grav documentation).
Wordpress and other cms are focused on offering ready-to-use products, and perhaps that is the weakest point of Grav, to make it more extensible to novice users. There are many themes that have options that are only seen in the code, but not in the admin panel, for example. Improving this would be a good thing to make Grav easier to use.

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Grav itself is pretty much alive but plugins and themes seem to be mostly dead and forgotten. Most of the themes or plugins what I have needed for my website hadn’t updated in years and when there is not so many choices I’m pretty much stuck. It would be so much better if I could just see which plugins or themes don’t work anymore.
I’m sure that nobody can’t deny that CMS without good themes and plugins is pretty weak.
I’m not novice on IT but I still find that if I enable theme or plugin and after that my website is just browser window full of error message without actually knowing what is wrong it is really confusing to anybody.

@everyone,

It is pretty useless to voice frustration on themes/plugins in this forum. It is not being visited by the dev team. The dev team eats/works/sleeps at Github and Discord.

As said before, there is a discussion topic on Github discussing this very matter. If you want to voice your ideas and want to be heart by the dev team, please contribute to the discussion on Github: Theme/plugin repository cleanup and quality control #3490

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Just to add my 2 cents here… Grav has a lot of uncomparable advantages among all the other CMS. It’s super flexible, super performant and a way more secure than wp or Joomla or whatever. And it’s ACTIVELY supported.

About plugins, themes, to be honest, I only use the featured one’s if I really need them.

For all the other possible cases, I do it by myself (super flexible with twig, CSS and PHP).

In conclusion, it’s not grav that is abandoned (yes it could be updated in some parts like twig) but some third parties plugins, themes (which has nothing to do with grav itself).

Happy coding then! :slight_smile:

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OK sorry I didn’t know that this is not the main forum for Grav where devs would be too.

I will just say that IMHO Grav should remove plugins/themes that doesn’t work anymore and after this I will go away.

As pamtbaau highlights in the other topic, solutions to highlighting whether themes and plugins are compatible with the current version of Grav core have been proposed and discussed in various GitHub-issues and -discussions, as well as through the various iterations of the forum and chat-channels, for years.

I wholeheartedly agree that this is a necessity for many users, even though most of these extensions are actually working even without updates for years. Grav’s Core API has been that reliant. Some of this would be supported through the long-promised and -awaited GPM 2.0, but that has yet to see the light of day.

I would rather propose to come at a solution from the other side: The community, especially those without as many years of developer-experience or familiarity with Grav’s codebase, should come together in creating and maintaining a channel for review and quality assurance of which parts of Grav’s ecosystem works at present. From my knowledge of the Core Dev Team, there is not excess capacity for community-building.

This could take many forms, but a simple repository that frequently maintains the sorts of tests from Theme/plugin repository cleanup and quality control, retains knowledge of the peculiarities of versioning, and other information about the ecosystem would greatly help. It would also pair especially well with a blog where contributors could highlight experiences from testing themes and plugins, and a set of pages documenting possible solutions.

Which is all to say, the community around Grav and its ecosystem would greatly benefit from a community-driven solution. This would also make it a great deal easier for the Core Dev Team to perform maintenance of the list of themes and plugins.

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I agree with OleVik. Sadly I needed to get my website work so I had to delete grav and move back to wordpress so this is not problem to me anymore but I will continue following Grav and if this things get fixed I’m happy to come back to use it.
Wordpress there was right away info on plugins which is tested working with current version of CMS and rating system for plugins and hopefully something like that will come to Grav too.

I hope all the best for Grav and people who work with it but I’m now out of here =)

For years I’ve worked with Wordpress, and usually succeed with plugins and themes, in terms that they work. (The styling is another thing)
For some 5 days I’m messing with Grav, and to my sadness, many themes don’t work, actually almost none. This is the third time with a brand new Grav installation (one wrong button and all falls apart) trying some themes, see the results on the pic :disappointed: I tried the skeletons, one worked, but it seems I need to start all over when I test another. Manuals miss important details. I would love to have a fast CMS like Grav…but to use a Dutch saying, “I came home from a cold fair” What I want to say to you all Gavvers, just be honest, Grav is for programmers and many of it’s “out of the box” stuff is obsolete.

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@bert6291,

For some 5 days I’m messing with Grav, and to my sadness, many themes don’t work, actually almost none.

Late '21 , I scanned all available themes for their compatibility with Grav 1.7.x. All themes created by the Grav team (27) are actively maintained, 64 out of 109 were not compatible.

It sure is a pain for new users, but “Almost none” seems a bit exaggerated…

The incompatibility is due to a breaking change in Twig which started to “autoescape” output as a security measure to prevent code injection. For example:

{% set variable = "<p>Hello World!</p>" %}
{{ variable }}

results in the following HTML being generated: &lt;p&gt;Hello World!&lt;/p&gt;, which is shown as plain <p>Hello World!</p> in the browser.

There are 2 ways to fix this:

  • This can be mitigated using a Grav config setting in /user/config/system.yaml:

    twig:
      autoescape: false
    strict_mode:
      twig_compat: true
    

    Please note, this effectively turns off the security measure.

  • It can also be fixed by editing the theme’s templates and add filter |raw to all trusted outputs like {{ page.content|raw }}. The chances that an abandoned theme will be upgraded and override your changes are slim I guess. But nonetheless…

What I want to say to you all Gavvers, just be honest, Grav is for programmers

I’m not part of the team so I do not know their initial intentions, but speed, flexibility, code simplicity and extensibility for “building” websites was probably a high priority.

Admin was an add-on to ease some tasks for non-developers, but everything and more can be done with the cli and code editor.

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