Using Grav to Build a Nonprofit Admin and Documentation Dashboard for a Community ISP

Hi all,

Iโ€™m building a nonprofit-cooperative ISP called PonyXPS_ISP, serving local nonprofits and underserved communities in Northern California. Weโ€™re using Grav CMS as the core system for our admin dashboard and documentation portal.

Our setup includes:

๐ŸŒ Grav as a flat-file dashboard accessible via local network or ZeroTier VPN

๐Ÿ“ Custom forms for Board meeting summaries, contract uploads, and volunteer coordination

๐Ÿ” Role-based access control for our small board of directors

๐Ÿ’พ Local-first model (no continuous cloud access required)

โšก Integrated with salvaged hardware running OpenWRT and battery-backed microservers

Weโ€™re keeping everything modular, open-source, and lightweight โ€” and Grav has been an amazing fit so far. That said, weโ€™re hitting some minor snags, including:

Page preview quirks (sometimes shows /:preview paths or incomplete content)

Markdown formatting in frontmatter causing display issues (e.g., emoji or headers being ignored)

Need for automated backups and restore features across 5โ€“10 nodes

Weโ€™d love tips, plugin recommendations, or suggestions on:

Improving multi-user form handling

Structuring a decentralized, replicable Grav setup

Reducing glitches in local-only (no internet) operation

Thanks for all the amazing work this community does โ€” Grav has been a key part of making this project feel possible.

โ€” PonyXPS@proton.me
https://PonyXPS.com

Not sure I can be of much help here, but the only errors I encountered related to frontmatters were always caused by incorrect use of single quotes, such as:

title: 'La palla รจ sul tavolo, l'hai vista?'

that is, not escaping single quotes or replacing them with proper apostrophes.

HIH