The Gantry team is proud to announce that Gantry 5 is now available on Grav. Introduced in Gantry 5.4, Grav becomes the newest CMS to receive full Gantry support.
Grav is an award-winning open source flat-file CMS built by members of the same team that created Gantry 5. This relationship between the two projects results in Grav benefitting from the same level of support and community-driven development as Gantry.
It also means that the user experience is consistent for both the Grav CMS and Gantry 5. It was early development of Grav that heavily influenced the look and style of Gantry 5's administrative interface in addition to its simple, human-readable structure of YAML configuration and Twig templating.
Simply put: These two projects are made for each other.
What is Grav?
Grav is a content management system (CMS) much like Joomla or WordPress. At the same time, it is very different from these two as it does not have a database. All of the information used to operate Grav is contained in text files written in Markdown, a simple, human readable method for formatting text with a small learning curve and easy-to-understand rules.
Grav is a fast and straightforward alternative to larger, more complex content management systems. It is perfect for smaller websites or those that want the convenience of a CMS like WordPress without all the bloat that comes with it.
Here are some resources to help you get acquainted with Grav:
- Official Grav Website
- Grav Documentation
- Giansimon Diblas - How to deploy a website using git
- David Walsh - Building Fast and Flexible Websites
- SitePoint - Building Faster Websites with Grav, a Modern Flat-file CMS
Gantry is also Grav's first major theming framework. This release opens a lot of doors for Grav as it will be able to benefit from Gantry's extensive feature set - which is already being used to power thousands of websites on Joomla and WordPress. Premium Gantry theme makers like RocketTheme will also be able to more easily port their Gantry 5 themes to Grav.
In order to provide Grav with the best possible experience, we've added a new Positions feature to Gantry 5. This feature creates virtual positions you can use to assign particles and place them anywhere you want on one or more layout(s). It's a great set-it-and-forget-it addition that gives Grav something that, until now, has been a part of larger database-driven content management systems.
Requirements
Of course, like any content management system, Grav has a set of requirements you should make sure your server meets before getting started.
Here is what you will need to run Grav:
- PHP 5.5.9 or higher
That is it! As long as you are running a web server (Apache, Nginx, LiteSpeed, Lightly, IIS, etc.) that is running a modern version of PHP, you should be totally fine.
Gantry requires Grav 1.1.9 or higher to run. As of the time of this writing, 1.1.9 is the latest version of Grav.
Getting Started with Grav and Gantry 5
We firmly recommend checking out Grav's documentation for any issues you come across getting started with Grav. The admin is very straightforward, but many of its users utilize its command line tools and extensive plugins library to get even more out of it.
The Gantry team will also be on hand for any Gantry-specific questions in the Gitter chat. Grav has a Gitter chat as well, which is a great place to go for advice and to get some tips to help you hit the ground running.
So, what are you waiting for? Download Gantry 5 for Grav and Helium or Hydrogen and dive in. You can also check out the live demo of Gantry 5, powered by Grav.