I will buy that one too, probably next year when I start a new website. Since the maintainer mentioned the project will remain active I have more faith in that purchase. But still, it’s a waste that so many other official skeletons are not maintained anymore.
I can only support that. Over the past few years, Grav has become my preferred solution for building websites because it is both maintainable and highly customizable.
As an experienced web and software developer, I greatly appreciate the value Grav brings to the open source ecosystem and would be happy to contribute if hands are needed.
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As a happy user of GRAV and Gantry (13 websites built using them), I will gladly help, though I’m not a programmer or coder. As for Gantry, Rockettheme is more or less in dead waters, mainly after Mark Taylor passed away. Once again I learned from trying and making errors and trying again…not the quickest way, I know, but hey, here I’m willing to give my twopence to Grav and Gantry!
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For the Spanish-speaking community, I am also translating the official Gantry documentation on my website https://pmdesign.dev.
In three months I will have more time to dedicate to my projects, which include the complete translation of the Grav and Gantry documentation into Spanish, and starting small tutorials (how to… type) to promote the use of Grav in the Spanish community, while learning from this and other forums.
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I am actually looking to switch from hugo to grav 
Hugo is great for what it does (static site generation from markdown) but grav seems to offer just the extra bit of dynamic site generation that enables extremely usuful functionality (admin panel that can be accessed from any device), even while retaining the flat file markdown workflow.
I wish somebody had written a hugo-to-grav migration guide though. While bare bones markdown content obviously works, figuring out all the templates, shortcodes, tags, filters, partials etc. is quite a learning curve.
I hardly understand why dead word mentioned at this point.
reasons come to my mind are
- have known security issues that makes using grav dangerous.
1- i dont know much about this but i dont think thats happening right now from what i see. - it works good as beta or testing app but not for real work.
2- i dont think that is right. if nothing, creating websites with pure html-css-js is super easy as it just needs pasting codes to base.html.twig file. there is also twig and php codes that can be used as natural langs. - there are errors that prevent good user experience.
3- there may be some, for example i had one that came with uploading images via flex-objects. i had to add rule to user to prevent checking that security measure to fix it. i dont remember any other one. so this reason is not the case at least for me at least. - i dont like admin plugin. i cant find plugins i need. i want more functionality. i need this and that but they are not here…
4- those problems wouldnt point to end of an app. these are just things that app doesnt offer, yet or never. for example i dont know php much so i cant create shopping website that users can pay for something so i needed a plugin for that but i couldnt find one for my country cuz of some reasons and now i dont have ability to create a shoping website. still that wont make me say “grav is dead”. i can just dont use grav but i wouldnt think it is dead cuz dead is something else.
but from what i read at this page grav will be dead if one person dies… that is a big risk since every second at least a person dies. I wish him good health and long life
special note: i really hope grav gets better much more. more i use it more i learn how to use it more i find what can i use it for. im glad i caryfully searched my options for cms and selected grav before any as my first.
have a nice day ^^.
My issue is that I do not want to bet on a dead horse. I need to migrate off Drupal 7 in two months and I do not have to time to follow the new very short release cycles of Drupal 11, 12, and so on Migrating and customing a new CMS is a huge time investment and I wished I had more time…
Continued development in a project is like a heart beat. That known security issues and bugs are fixed is crucial and it’s crucial that future critical issues are also fixed in due time. And that is the extrapolation from the current state. A stable software may look like it’s declining and software is rarely “complete” or finished.
I need a simple visual editor. Not really full wysiwyg editor but something like the Lyx approach is fine for me… Studioeditor by Saveva looks good, but guessing from the github repository, it lived only for 2 weeks. And the editors listed in the plugins list are also quite unmaintained and the official premium is even not available at all.
Why “no monetary benefit”? I don’t believe in sustainable (hard) work out of “being nice” or for the afterlife, and often such projects fail and get stopped in the end. I believe, though, in monetization options that not only don’t disturb users, but even enrich user experience! I think you just have to be creative and think of quality cooperation options (like with WooCommerce), once the software is sustainably widely used.
A positive example, in my opinion: Firefox! As far as I know, the browser is open source, but they still earn with it (e.g. by setting Google as the main search - which most users use anyway - and getting money for that). Now they’re seemingly starting some advertising solution, which is neither bad (as most advertising market is in the hands of Google and Facebook etc.).
A negative example, in my opinion: Wikipedia. They’re always begging for donations (even though being one of the biggest websites worldwide). Instead of begging, they could simply put some non-intrusive (Google) ads (or the like) on their site. This wouldn’t bother me at all as a user (not more than the huge donation banners), and I would neither see a problem regarding independence (donations from big donors are somehow also not fostering independence…).
A third example: since Google Podcasts was stopped, I’m using an open source alternative - which I really enjoy. I wouldn’t bother if they’d earn good money through ads within podcasts (which are there anyway) or some other way of cooperation (or discreet possibility for podcasters to promote their podcasts). That’s better than them neglecting their project out of frustration some day…
Ads are one of the worst models of income. Either they are blocked on client side and that part of income is lost completely, or lots of users simply avoid such websites, which means there’s relatively no income for smaller pages
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That’s true, and it was just an example (not suitable for Grav, as a software should clearly be ad free to be taken seriously). For a huge quality website like Wikipedia, contextual ads could make a lot of sense for income, though (and ad blockers can be detected and forbidden).
You’re describing what huge greedy corporations do
Is unfriendliness your way of saying thanks for the feedback? I tried to cheer up the chief developer and contribute some practical ideas! And I don’t know what’s “greedy” about advertisement? Neither the many who need ads to finance themselves, nor advertisers, are bad. Somehow you need to cover your costs, no? Even open source projects with many volunteers mostly need to pay for hosting etc.
This:
You’re suggesting to prevent users from page access if they use ad blockers. Your suggestions makes no sense in Grav case
Grav already has ads for promoting their own premium products.
Sorry, but if you can’t handle different opinions and views, it doesn’t necessarily mean someone is unfriendly 
First you insinuated that I’m promoting “greedy” methods, and now you’re insinuating that I can’t handle other opinions. Isn’t that unfriendly? You were also unfriendly to another user in another thread that was just trying to give constructive feedback, so maybe you should reconsider your behavior. Otherwise, people will start to lose motivation to contribute (like me now).
I also don’t think we do have different opinions (and yours has priority as a Grav expert), but you simply didn’t understand me or read my feedback correctly / completely. So back to the facts:
I had made clear before that I don’t see ads as a possible monetization option for Grav. This was just an example. Besides that I don’t find it “greedy” if newspapers (or other websites) prevent access to their pages when ad blockers are used, if they rely on income from ads.
I use ad blockers myself (as most ads are annoying and slowing down pages etc.), but I understand that many websites need ads for monetization. So I don’t blame them for being filthy corporations 
I know that you’re offering premium options, but seeing the message of the chief developer, I assumed that this is not contributing enough income and motivation (yet). That’s why I tried to initiate a little brainstorming about non intrusive monetization options.
I personally am not a fan of “freemium” as this often means that it’s either not really free, or that the premiums offered are not really useful or affordable for most users (like also most users probably don’t donate to Wikipedia or most other donation financed projects, as they simply don’t have the money or easy means for it).
That’s why I think that cooperations or the sale of useful services (for ex. on commission basis) could make sense (like Wordpress is also not made “for fun” or for the sake of mankind, but they are earning money by offering useful hosting options or domains etc., which makes sense for a CMS…).
First of all - I don’t know you or most of the other members, so I’m trying to keep neutral
Second - you just admitted, that ads for Grav is not an option, but still suggested them (even if as an example)
Third - any monetisation option, which users are forced into, is intrusive. Probably the only non-intrusive option is donations, which you clearly don’t approve
Fourth - I’ve spent almost 10 years in the online news industry and there are plenty of ways to monetize, but 70% of estate area filled with ads is pure greed
Okay, I’ll forgive you, and it was all my fault - to stop our mutual accusations
I agree on the “forced into is intrusive”, but this speaks against the “freemium” approach of Grav and for my skeptical view of “freemium”.
A concrete example: within the discussions on the Grav comments plugin (for being very out of date), your chief developer - at least for a short moment - considered making the plugin a premium plugin. That’s my problem with “freemium”, that you cannot rely on the essential things being 100% free.
That’s why I mentioned cooperations as an alternative, like Firefox getting lots of money from Google for using its search (even though users can still switch to another search engine). This is not intrusive and makes sense for everyone (Google gets more users and ad revenues, Firefox gets monetization, and users get a well-maintained and free browser).
A theoretical example of cooperations within Grav could be a useful plugin which Grav users can use for displaying (and measuring) ads, and Grav gets a commission or payments from Google (if Google ads are offered). This is just a theoretical example, you could also think of a cooperation with Woocommerce, a translation company or any other company that could be interested in your CMS users.
I don’t find this intrusive - if I need a Woocommerce or any other commercial (sales or revenue related) plugin anyway, I don’t mind if you get a commission from them for additional sales or users, for instance.
I’m also not at all against donations, I just think that they don’t contribute enough in most cases, if even huge websites like Wikipedia seem to have constantly too few of them. (I named the theoretical example of Wikipedia ads to say that I wouldn’t see an ethical problem with ads and Wikis independence.)
As you have so much news experience (cool!), you’ll know how hard it is to monetize newspapers. But seemingly some still have advertising partners paying them, so as they’re having a hard time anyway, I won’t blame them if they require me to allow their ads. Journalism and running a news website (or any other website) isn’t free, so also it’s usage can’t always be (ad) free - and using an ad blocker is principally unfair, then.
Also developing and providing Grav won’t be free (and motivation for doing it voluntarily without enough revenue won’t be endless), so I guess it makes sense to think about motivating and non-intrusive monetization options (at least as soon as you need or want more revenues to cover at least the basic costs, for instance of a full-time chief developer)!
There are people who donate simply because they choose to (for example me) and believe in a different busness model. You can argue about the effectiveness, but you can’t just ignore them.
Even if I have read more than one (hyper) sensitive reaction to your comments, you don’t seem rude or unfriendly to me. Thank you for your inputs.
The funding model for internet projects is a nice debate that does not belong in this thread. The next comment in this thread should be from @rhuk who said he would look for ways to allow an injection of support and collaboration with this project.
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I use Grav for my website, i would like to earn money by building websites for others too but i couldnt till now. When i earn enough for myself i am planning buying services from devs of Grav and that is how i am planing to help Grav (for myself, not for devs). At some fields of trade, sometimes owner of a product gives us some of their items for free and ask for payment if we can earn from selling them, if not they ll simply get items back with no money request. I see Grav devs similar. I use Grav and if i earn money by using it i ll give some of it back, that is what i can do for now…
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