I'm researching GRAV CMS for project use

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I’m researching various CMS… here’s my wish list:

CMS Requirements

  1. Self Hosted (license or owned)
  2. White Labeled
  3. Multi Site Ready
  4. Unlimited Sites
  5. Drag and Drop Builder
  6. Import Themes With URL
  7. WYSIWYG
  8. Extensive Plugin Library
  9. Ability to sell add-on sites easily
  10. Theme Library Builder

Would love to hear user experiences and determine if GRAV is a fit for my project needs.

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1 - 4: yes!
5: depends on the theme you choose
6: err, I think so (??)
7: getting there
8: you be the judge
9: I don’t understand. Sell what you want, generally, but it’s not the rat-infested commercial playground of Wordpress.
10: Also don’t understand

Can I add another criterion? Amazing and supportive community who don’t try to screw you for basic information and functionality.

If you as a developer want to build things yourself easily to a high standard, it’s great. If you rely completely on clicking plugins together without understanding much, still might work OK depending on your task. It’s getting better with GUIs for site builders and content editors, but not as friendly as many others yet. It’s also very fast.

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Thanks @hughbris I really appreciate you taking the time to respond.

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@mwoodfield I recently moved away from Wordpress to Grav and would like to share that experience with you.

In short:

  • Migration was a breeze…
  • Development is fun again.
  • Maintenance is easy.
  • Performance is well taken care of.
  • And I have come to love it…

My wishes:

  • I wanted it to be sleek and trimmed.
  • Modern technologies/infrastructure.
    Longstanding and outdated foundations (like WP) always inhibits innovation.
  • No required database. See advantages below.
  • A young CMS is more able and willing to listen to the wishes of the community.
  • Multi language build in.
  • Performance at heart.

Experience:

  • As said before: Migration was a breeze.
  • Small code size of themes/plugins.
    Comparing same home grown theme: Wordpress 52 files/444kB, Grav 15 files/24kB.
    Comparing same home grown contactform: Wordpress 19files/120kB, Grav 11 files/ 24kB.
    A few of the code/time savers are:
    • There is no need to build an Admin UI for the theme/plugin.
      You provide a field definition and Grav builds the form. Or your could opt for no UI at all and only edit the flat file configs. Everything can be done through an editor.
    • The use of Twig to design page layouts/templates.
    • Well structured object-oriented core code and hence well structured plugins and theme code.
  • Well structured documentation.
    The step-by-step tutorials make it very easy to get started building themes and plugins.
  • Easiness of changing site configurations using my preferred and already opened code editor instead of heavy/slow admin UI.
  • Because of the lack of a database:
    • All code and config can be git versioned.
    • Distribution/updates of pages/code/configuration can be done via Git repos.
    • Backup of my dev environment is my remote git repository containing pages and config files.
    • Backup of production is zip of root of site or pages/configuration only, or git again.
    • No more searching for configs in tables in MySQL and carefully tweaking serialized data or using a plugin for that.
    • No database lookup overhead when loading a page.
  • Performance:
    • I like that Grav is able to bundle and minify all css/js files required by theme and plugins into a single css/js file which improves page load times considerably.
    • Everyting that can be cached will be cashed. No need for extra plugins.

Hope this helps…

2 Likes
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@anon76427325 thanks so much for taking the time to reply. I really appreciate your insight on this platform.