I'm researching GRAV CMS for project use

4

@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    Longstanding and outdated foundations (like WP) always inhibits innovation.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