Building Faster Websites with Grav, a Modern Flat-file CMS

Nowadays, there’s an interesting get-back-to-the-basics tendency among web developers. Some modern, best-in-class technologies --- like Markdown, Twig, and YAML --- are often used together to produce many new, lightweight CMSs, focused on speed, simplicity and productivity. The principle they all follow is pretty straightforward: when things get too complex, it’s better to start from scratch, instead of trying to clean up the existing mess.

In this article, I’m going to introduce you to one of the best examples of such a started-from-scratch platform, called Grav.

What Is Grav and Why Should I Use It?

Grav is a modern, flat-file CMS, developed by RocketTheme. Why modern? Because it uses modern PHP and latest standards like Markdown, Twig, YAML, Doctrine Cache, etc. Flat-file CMS means that there’s no database involved, and instead all the site’s content and configuration settings are stored in plain text files.

To grasp this relatively new concept better, imagine a regular, HTML-based website, as in the good old days, but with added ability to create and maintain the actual HTML files dynamically. While you picture this view, bear in mind two things:

• First, Grav is not a static site generator. The content is written in Markdown files, and these files are processed and converted to HTML files dynamically on demand. You won’t find any static HTML file inside your site directory.
• Second, even though Grav doesn’t use a database, it still gives you a way to manipulate your content dynamically --- almost as a database-driven CMS such as WordPress.

So, you can think of Grav as a kind of a hybrid, combining the best from both static and dynamic worlds. Furthermore, a flat-file CMS gives you some additional very attractive advantages:

• A database-free site eliminates all the headaches and bottlenecks that dealing with a database can bring.
• Because you deal with files only, you can easily add 100% version control for all of them by using Git and services like GitHub or GitBucket.
• You can copy all of your content and configuration files and move them wherever you wish, which makes your site completely portable and easy to back up.

No matter whether you are a developer, a designer, or just a user, Grav may have something for you.

Grav is developer friendly
It offers many useful tools for developers such as a CLI Console, GPM (Grav Package Manager), and a Debug Bar. All these tools make for easier developing, debugging, installing and updating themes and plugins.

Grav is designer friendly
Designers often aren’t experienced coders, and they need an easy way to bring their designs to life. With the power and simplicity of the Twig template engine, this can be done fairly easily. Using Twig to output PHP is as simple as using a CSS preprocessor, like Sass, for outputting CSS.

Grav is user friendly
Thanks to the Admin Panel plugin, users can create and manipulate their site’s content, and manage the entire site itself, in a convenient GUI-ified way.

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by Ivaylo Gerchev via SitePoint