I was thinking, open-source software is often “abandoned” by developers after some time. Imagine you start a blog with Grav and you write lots of posts in a couple years. Imagine Grav stops updating in the meantime.
How much longer would the last release run on servers without issues? And once it stopped working, your blog doesn’t exist anymore, since Grav is needed to create the final html from your templates and content files in a very specific way. And it would be a chore to re-format hundreds of posts for another engine (I’m no developer so I wouldn’t know how to automate that).
Thanks for any thoughts you might share about this.
Seeing as the vast majority of webhosts still run some version of PHP 5.6, I’d estimate that the current version of Grav would still run exactly the same for a good 10+ years, on a modern host that runs PHP >= 7.2.
Grav’s dependencies are pretty much only PHP, and a modern variant at that, and standard PHP-extensions that are enabled almost everywhere. There are installations of CMS-software from the late 1990s that still run, webhosts are painfully slow to upgrade, so I would not be worried.
Even if, down the line, you need to change format, Markdown is very well specified and easy to work with. Since it’s only plain text with minimal formatting, the work compared to a poorly documented format stored in a database will be much easier.
Thanks a lot for your answer. I installed Grav in a local server to try it out, and unfortunately I found out it’s too difficult for me. I have basic notions of html and css, so Markdown is OK, but the templates are way beyond me, and the Admin plugin doesn’t allow for customizing them through a GUI. I have some other doubts too, it just feels too cumbersome overall.
So I think I’m going with Publii. It offers a much more limited, ready-made, cookie-cutter solution, but that’s just what I need, it’s easier all the way through (for example, I like the Post Editor a lot better) and it happens to suit my needs quite well.