As a new user I was excited by grav and how simple it all seemed until I came to this line in the instructions:
“Download the latest-and-greatest Grav or Grav + Admin package.”
You’re asking me, who knows nothing about Grav to make a decision on the very first step and don’t provide any guidance over why I would want one over the other.
IMHO you should take a page out of django’s book and just include the admin by default (i.e., make the package with the admin the default) and make a second core package for advanced users who don’t want the admin. Then the step one instruction is install this one package.
Dear @varg, dear all,
I am a rather inexperienced grav user who turned to these packages a while ago without prior knowledge on other CMS.
To me it was rather clear what the “admin” does, and to date, I run two insignificant web pages which do not require it at all.
I disagree with making “grav+admin” default. If that was the case, many novel users who might not need “admin” will install it by default, and that increases complexity (i.e. understandability) and potential attack surface. It also increases the memory footprint of base grav. I think these disadvantages are particularly problematic with “admin” because it naturally brings the feature to log in to a website, so all kinds of trouble with user management and access permissions (which might not be obvious to beginners).
I understood that you suggest to keep the “dev” variant of a naked grav. So this is just a debate of what people get who are lazy to read the docs. Speaking of docs, of course good documentation is key. Both options could be presented side by side with a clear explanation.
However, I’m not anyone involved in such design decisions, this is up to the grav devs
Good points although django, wordpress, drupal, and other cms systems include admins by default. Not without consequences I’m sure, but the consequences seem to be worthwhile trade-offs for those projects. By memory if you mean disk space I think that’s negligible in this day, if you mean ram I would assume that the admin doesn’t add to ram unless it’s actively being used but I do not know this for sure.
Yes you can read the docs and eventually figure it out (as I did), but my point is to reduce complexity. Keep things simple. Although I see how from your perspective you could say including the admin increases complexity.
To have an admin interface or not is also a question of where the project want`s to sail. One can build hurdles / filters not to let newbies clog the forum or appear more sophisticated but is this the intended way? It took me 20 days to come back to grav after the first (rather typical) problems. Meanwhile friends talked me into hugo. The offer of good / excellent CMS ist large. In my case I need a CMS with admin interface as I build small homepages for friends who have no idea of the background. And I want something new which will hopefully last 5+ years.
I’d dare say Admin increases complexity in all cases, once you consider that Admin is an all-encompassing interface for all things Grav. I agree that Downloads | Grav CMS could make the distinction between Grav and Grav + Admin clearer.
In addition to falkm’s points, it’s worth noting that Grav by itself – “Core” as we say – only requires you to install it and read Basic Tutorial | Grav Documentation. Admin is a nice wrapper for all of it, but Grav is centered around you editing your content as Markdown and settings as YAML.
One of the historical reasons why Grav keeps the two separate is that the Admin-interface is an added feature, not necessary for Grav to run or manage. Its easily available through the downloads, the GPM, skeletons, and more, but integrating it adds unnecessary weight, complexity, and insecurity where it’s not needed.
I agree with most of the answers above. Most of the platforms mentioned above include admin because admin is integral part of them. This is not the case with Grav and in fact we consider this to be a strength.
To give a couple examples, with Grav you are able to decide if you want to spin off your project with or without the admin, this might very well vary between projects.
Also something people tend to overlook that we recommend is to have admin only in your development environment but then completely remove it from production.
These are the reasons why we don’t want to make admin included by default and why we offer you the choice.
Sure your first impact coming from a different platform might leave you thinking a bit as to why this is, and we can improve the wording on the website in this regards, but ultimately there is a reason why it’s like this and I don’t think we will change that.
I also wanted to add that in the past few days I have been working on automating the builds of the Skeletons. These will now come also with an extra package that includes admin and you will be able to decide which one to pick from the site.
Edit: this is available now: Skeleton Build Automation | Grav CMS
I wouldn’t say the django admin is integral (although it is on wordpress and drupal). I have built a couple django sites and don’t use the admin.
At the very least I think the documentation should be improved and clarified. Again on step 1 you’re asking someone, without giving any reasoning, to either install version A or version B.
I ended up using Hugo but I’ll keep an eye on grav.
