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.
Grav is still in beta, but already it's so impressive!
- Can be self-hosted requiring only PHP 5.4! Great for those opting for a simple hosting provider and can't/don't want to bother with:
- Installing, maintaining and backing up a database,
- Installing software via shell, e.g. Node.js.
- Flat-file and high performance!
- Simple file copy deployment and backup.
- Lots of useful SEO and related settings (ETags, Meta, etc.)
- Serves optimized pages - including advanced caching, pipelining (combines .CSS and .JS files), built-in minification, and thumbnails.
- So many beautiful templates! Get them as themes or pre-built "ready-to-use" skeletons, which include Grav core, sample pages and plug-ins - minimum effort to get going!
- Did I mention plug-ins? Useful plugins, not too many to make it difficult to choose, and not to few to be useless!
- An administration user interface!
- Last, but never, ever, least, open source! You can't beat the price of free!
In my short survey,
- I was already familiar with WordPress and am biased against it since I think it's slow and hard to customize.
- I did not consider paid software, like Kirby and Movable Type
- I did not want to have to struggle to install software pre-requisites (Ghost requires Node.js, Jekyll requires Ruby, etc.)
- I did not want an outdated project with no future (primarily judging by the last version date and frequency of updates) like Nucleus CMS or Chyrp.
- I found some simply too hard for dumb ol' me, Textpattern included.
- I looked at other solutions that was as new and as promising as Grav. I simply didn't know how to determine which was better/best, e.g. Bolt.cm, Anchor CMS, Habari and Pagekit.