Hi there,
I’m a freelance web dev exploring options in order not to use WordPress all the time.
I have a few questions:
I know I can build anything but what kind of websites fit particularly well “the grav way”? I have the feeling that;
a static landing page seems faster/lighter to developp in vanilla HTML/CSS.
any kind of content editing (except pure text) will require me as a dev and my customer wouldn’t be able to do it him/herself (add a gallery: create a special module, add 2 columns: create a module, etc.)
blog posts seem the only thing a customer could safely edit
Or did I miss something?
Another topic is dev time:
Do you have a collection of modules and appropriate CSS in order to create websites fast? Or a theme collection? Or do you do a lot from scratch?
Last topic is development:
I’ve seen some nice themes but content seems all over the place: In the frontmatter, in the page itself, as images, in the twig etc. Nothing I couldn’t find, but I thought: what if a customer wants to change or add an image in this section? In one module he has to use the frontmatter in another it’s in the content and in the third, the image description is used as text/title.
How do you deal with consistency?
So I’m curious about your dev workflow and usecases with customers.
Never did a professional job for clients with Grav, but I’d say you, as a developer, should prepare a theme with all the configs, templates & plugins and the client would manage the website via the admin plugin
I’m a freelancer making websites with Grav CMS for clients, often migrating from wordpress. My opinion:
Grav works best with corporate sites. I have found limits when it comes to setting up something complex like an e-commerce, an academy or a complex blog. It is possible that someone with enough knowledge and support from third party tools can achieve that complexity. I find the engine very powerful, but there are still limits (flex-objects, for example, do not support the multilingual feature, which is a must in all my projects).
However, other barriers collapse in Grav’s favour when you discover unlimited functions that on other platforms require third-party plugins: forms, user access control, content types, administration interface design, etc.
Your choice…
That for me is an advantage (and an added reason to migrate from wordpress): the web design is well differentiated from the client’s edition. Clients who want to trash do my work? No thanks.
I think so. My advice is to invest some time in learning Grav to see its full potential. It doesn’t offer 40,000 semi-premium plugins to do whatever you want on a website but the 1000 features it offers are very good and very well focused.
Thanks for chiming in,
with some substantial help from a community member I was able to start to feel “the grav way” and notice its strength. I’ll do some side quest projects with it and see from there.
What helped a lot was understanding blueprints, that’s what I was actually looking for.
Now I guess I have to understand flex-objects and I’ll be good for a while.
(I have to say I miss some semi-advanced tutorials going further than “how to install a plugin”. If someone have good ressources, I’m all ears)
Exactly. Any design should be handled with theme templates and not with content. When users are allowed to change the layout via content editor, it’s just a blank page waiting to happen
It’s true that there is no video explaining how Grav works. It would be very useful to quickly understand its potential. So that the world of knowledge sharing is not divided between people who consume and people who contribute, I use the following rule: for each benefit I obtain altruistically for another person, I look for 3 persons I can help (that’s what made me respond to your post). Hopefully I or someone else will find some time to do a little Grav tutorial!