How to create web pages quickly and easily with Grav

Having a presence on the internet has become one of the main objectives of companies and individuals, from amateur blogs to innovative web pages, each with its own style and different objectives. The age of the internet allows anyone to learn to How to create web pages quickly and easily, there are multiple tools that make this a trivial job but today we will talk about grav, that we have no doubt that you are going to love it.

What is Grav?

grav is a modern open source CMS that allows us to build web pages in a speed boat tour, tailored y flexible, is based on Web-platform and does not need to be installed, we simply have to extract the ZIP file and we will have grav working.

grav follows similar principles to other CMS platforms, but has a different design philosophy than most. grav comes with a powerful package management system to allow easy installation, plugin and theme enhancement, as well as simple updates.

Grav logo

Technologies included in Grav

The architecture of grav was designed to use the best and most stable technologies, with the aim that simple to use and easy to extend. Some of the key technologies included grav are:

• Twig Templates: To control the scope of the user interface
• Markdown: To create content easily
• YAML: For easy setup
• parsedown: To have Markdown faster and with more support
• Doctrine Cache: For good performance
• Pimple Dependency Injection Container: To be extensible and maintainable
• Symfony Event Dispatcher: For managing plugin events
• Symfony Console: For the CLI interface
• Gregwar Image Library: For manipulating dynamic images
  

  Grav Dashboard

Why choose Grav?

There are 4 fundamental reasons why I think that grav it is a CMS that we could choose to create our web pages.

Grav Editor

Grav is fast

This CMS It was conceived with the intention of being the fastest of its kind, therefore since its creation its developers have taken great care in the technology and the way it has been programmed, in order to offer high performance.

Grav is easy to use

grav It is designed for both novice and expert users, so its interface is quite intuitive, its functionalities are well documented, and it has a very narrow learning line. Also thanks to the many plugins that Grav offers and that you can add, each of its functionalities can be adapted to your taste and comfort.

The administrator of grav provides a simple and intuitive interface to make the configuration and creation of content in an easy, fast and pleasant way. In addition, in the administrator we can also view the status of the site, statistics, entries, modify the configurations, install packages with a single click, among others.

Grav is extensible

Inspired by other successful CMS and software, grav has aimed to incorporate a powerful package manager that allows adding new functionalities, improvements, plugins, packages of other software among others. Similarly, the creators of grav They have developed a powerful API, to have a more organized and clean development, in addition to being able to have integration with third parties.

Grav is open source

A reason that for us is very weighty, grav es Open Source and all the code is available in your official repository. You can improve, contribute, test, create new functionalities, study its code among other things, this CMS it is open to the world and needs you to evolve. Thanks to its excellent community, grav advances are many and the speed with which bugs or problems are solved is notorious.

Grav Features

grav has many features and functionalities, so many that on their official site they have created a session just to list them, we are going to base ourselves on it to make them known to you:

Grav Plugins

Flat-File Architecture

grav it's fast and flexible thanks in part to the highly optimized Flat-File architecture.

Smart cache

It has a caching very sophisticated that is used in all its processes, the same it knows when to update the cache automatically.

Instant install

You only need to unzip the Grav package and run, so that you start the configuration of your CMS

CLI tools

grav has a series of command line tools, such as, dependency installation, clear cache, user creation and backups.

Package Manager

It has a package manager that allows you to easily find, install and update extensions for Grav.

Extensive documentation

- grav has not left behind the documentation of its tool, it has a site dedicated to your documentation, plus tons of tutorials and guides.

Multi-Site Capability

You can configure a single grav to run multiple sites, as well as other advanced settings.

SEO friendly

Human-readable URLs throughout the whole site y metadata per pages they provide fantastic SEO capabilities.

Users and Roles

You can easily create users and roles, to which you can establish permissions to restrict their access to any page.

Debugging and Logs

It has a powerful debugging panel that helps greatly in the development process, providing vital information in a clear way.

Multi-Language Support

grav It can be configured in any language, or it can even be used in multiple languages, it is designed to detect the language of the end user and thus display the information according to the language of the same.

Version control and synchronization support

You can use GIT, SVN, Dropbox and other services, for version management and syncing your data with ease.

Multiple content tools

• Modular pages
• Custom Fields
• Flexible taxonomies
• Native support for a variety of images, videos, sounds, files, and formats
• Image processing
• Automatic pagination
• Automatic image management
• It is the only CMS with native support for proper visualization of images on the retina and HiDPI

Extensive customization capabilities

grav has no design restrictions, provides:

• Language templates.
• Inheritance in the themes, which allows us to extend the main themes and make our adaptations in our own classes, this gives the possibility of having easier updates.
• Control over CSS and JS.
• Multiple design plugins.
• Ability to integrate with any CSS framework such as Bootstrap, Foundation, Pure, etc.

What can we do with Grav?

grav It has no limits, from simple to sophisticated, it has the flexibility to feed all types of websites. Its flexible content structure and powerful templates allow easy realization of any design.

There are numerous sites made with Grav, each one with different structures, logic and designs, so it can be adapted to any idea or business model.

Grav installation

Installation grav it is a trivial process. In fact, there is no actual installation. We have three options to "install" Grav. The first and simplest, is to simply download the file zip and extract it. The second way is installation with the composwr. The third way is to clone the code directly from GitHub and then run a script to install the necessary dependencies:

Check the PHP version

Grav is incredibly easy to set up and run. Make sure you have at least the version of PHP 5.5.9, for this go to the terminal and type:

$ php -v

This should report the version and build of PHP. For example:

PHP 5.5.20 (cli) (built: Jan 19 2014 21:32:15)
Copyright (c) 1997-2013 The PHP Group
Zend Engine v2.4.0, Copyright (c) 1998-2013 Zend Technologies

Install Grav from ZIP

The easiest way to install Grav is to download the ZIP and extract it:

1. Download  the latest version of Grav.
2. Extract the zip file in the webroot or root directory from your web server, example. ~/webroot/grav

Install Grav with composer

The alternative method is to install Grav with composer:

$ composer create-project getgrav/grav ~/webroot/grav

If you want to use the development version of grav, add 1.x-dev  as an additional parameter:

$ composer create-project getgrav/grav ~/webroot/grav 1.x-dev

Install Grav from GitHub

Another method is to clone Grav from the GitHub repository, and then run a simple install script with the dependencies:

1. Clone the Grav repository into GitHub to a folder webroot or root directory from your web server, example. ~/webroot/grav. Run a terminal and go to the root directory of the web server:

   $ cd ~/webroot
   $ git clone -b master https://github.com/getgrav/grav.git

2. Install the dependencies vendor with composer:

   $ composer install --no-dev -o

3. Install plugins and theme dependencies using Grav CLI application bin/grav:

   $ cd ~/webroot/grav
   $ bin/grav install

   This clones automatically the required dependencies from GitHub directly into this Grav install.

Grav running

Once we have running grave, The next step is to adapt and modify it to our liking, for this we can help ourselves from the official Grav developer documentation, especially the basic tutorial that will teach you everything you need to become an expert in Grav and therefore an excellent website builder.

And what did you think gravTell us your impressions, doubts or tell us about alternatives to this tool that you have tried. We hope that from today someone can create web pages with Grav.