What is Grav?

Grav is a Fast, Simple, and Flexible file-based Web-platform. There is Zero installation required. Just extract the ZIP archive, and you are already up and running. Although Grav follows principles similar to other flat-file CMS platforms, it has a different design philosophy than most.

The name Grav is just a shortened version of the word Gravity. The shared namespace of our platform and a movie starring Sandra Bullock is pure coincidence! More importantly, gravity is also a fundamental physical principle that describes the forces of attraction between objects. Frankly, the name was chosen as a temporary "codename" for the project, and it just stuck.

The underlying architecture of Grav is built using well established and best-in-class technologies. This is to ensure that Grav is simple to use and easy to extend. Some of these key technologies include:

Grav's Place in the Universe

There are many powerful open source CMS solutions for building complex websites. Some of the more commonly used ones are Joomla, WordPress, and Drupal. The downside of these platforms is that they have a steep learning curve associated with them. This requires a significant amount of your time - and this may be the time that you do not have.

These platforms provide a wealth of features and functionality that you can extend with a wide variety of open source and proprietary plug-ins and themes. These extensions and themes are themselves often feature-packed, requiring more knowledge and time on the part of the developer yet.

In the end, you often find yourself creating a website that requires many plugins and extensions from many different vendors. This can make your design overly complicated and difficult to maintain over the long term.

Grav tackles the problem differently. It focuses primarily on your content and turns your content structure into a navigable site. The underpinnings of Grav are simple, yet via extensive events, you have complete control over every step in the Grav workflow.

This solution allows simple plugins to quickly and easily add powerful functionality. Using Grav also leads to a rapid development environment with an installation process that takes seconds, including a straightforward content creation method with a minimal learning curve. All of this contributes to making Grav friendly to the designer, the developer, and the end user.

To get a basic site up-and-running requires minimal Web development experience. If you dig a little deeper, you will discover that there is very little Grav cannot accomplish.

Grav Logos and Press Information

You can find a summary about Grav, including Grav logos and press information, on our media page.

The simplest way to navigate the documentation is to use the Previous and Next arrows ( | ) at the top of each page. You can see your progress represented by the check marks () in the sidebar.

Found errors? Think you can improve this documentation? Simply click the Edit link at the top of the page, and then the icon on Github to make your changes.

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