There are a couple of things I don’t like with the feeds produced by the standard Grav Syndication Feed Plugin. Fortunately, the feeds are generated via Twig templates that can easily be customized!

Happy New Year! A big welcome to 2022! I’ve finally updated the look of my blog with a new theme. Well, not really... you see, I’m not very creative, and so, my theme pretty much remains the same... just more purple.

When I first used Grav, “a modern open source flat-file CMS,” to host this site, I setup a local development environment using macOS’s built-in Apache and PHP. But this is getting harder with each macOS release, so it’s time to use a Docker container instead.

The Apache and PHP bundled with macOS Catalina 10.15 does not include the PHP ZIP extension. Grav (specifically, the Problems Plugin) detects this issue, and Grav will not run! Here is a workaround.

While testing out Grav, it’s quite easy to setup a local instance on a macOS computer, since macOS already comes with a suitable web server (Apache 2.4.x and PHP 7.x). I never realized I didn’t actually describe how I set it up, but just wanted to point out one important change.

I re-designed my blog template using a new CSS framework called Bluma, re-developed all JavaScript without jQuery and customized some plugins. This was quite a journey, so this post is going to be quite long too!

I’m usually quite pedantic when it comes to minimizing code and optimizing web page performance. I was a bit surprised to find that this blog’s page speed was far from ideal! Google PageSpeed Insights returned a very low score for this blog. Back when I started this blow, I must’ve neglected optimization, as I was too busy learning Grav, modifying my template, etc.

On my hosting provider, there is a slight tweak needed to get Grav to run on PHP 5.6. Here's the solution:

I just updated Grav to 1.1.1!

I opted to install Grav via the ZIP package, as documented here. My hosting provider does not give me shell access, so I would not be using git or the Grav Package Manager (GPM), but limiting myself to FTP or the cPanel File Manager.

In starting this blog, I installed and tested various Blogging and Content Management Systems (CMS), finally settling on Grav. Here's why I like Grav.