GRAV Review – CMS Test and Features

What Is Grav? How Does It Work? Why is it a good CMS Platform? How to use it to your advantage? Welcome to our review of Grav CMS Platform.

Grav is a modern, open-source flat-file content management system (CMS) that allows users to create and manage websites efficiently. Unlike traditional database-driven CMS platforms, Grav stores content in flat files, making it lightweight, fast, and easy to use. With a focus on simplicity and flexibility, Grav is known for its modular architecture, enabling users to extend and customize their websites through various plugins and themes.

Features of Grav CMS

The platform offers several key features related to website activity and oversight by web publishers. In the following sections, we provide a detailed review of each of these features.

Twig Templating

Twig Templating is to enable the user to have more powerful control over the UI (User interface). The main benefits of this technology or to be more specific – “Template Engine” are the following:

• Twig is fast and it compiles templates down to plain optimized PHP code. Compared to regular PHP code, Twig offers optimized code that has reduced overhead to a minimum.
• Twig is secure because it features a sandboxing mode that zones out the untrusted code from the template. This allows it to maintain speed by allowing users to modify the design with ease.
• Twig is flexible, just like a Lego constructor. THe main benefit here is that Twig has a lexer and parser that are designed to allow devs to define which tags and filters to add and remove and create their own DSL.

Markdown

Markdown is more of a language that is made with tech in mind. Its main idea is to be as lightweight as possible and since the project started back in 2004, its creators John Gruber and Aaron Swartz have done quite the progress.

Markdown has been created with the main idea to format readme types of files, online forum comments, and to create rich text using simple text editing software.

Markdown is a lightweight markup language with plain-text-formatting syntax, created in 2004 by John Gruber with Aaron Swartz. Markdown is often used to format readme files, for writing messages in online discussion forums, and to create rich text using a plain text editor.

YAML

Yet another feature that carries the word “simplicity” in mind is YAML data serialization language. Its primary purpose is to enable the users the following actions:

• To be able to port data between a variety of often-used programming languages.
• To match the native data structure of languages that are agile.
• To have the type of model that supports generic tools.
• To enable one-pass processing of information.
• To be extensible and expressive.
• To be easy to use and employ.

Given these goals, YAML has been maturing since it has been created, going through a lot of different variants. The latest versions of YAML support new types of languages, such as Javascript, Perl, Python, PHP, and Ruby.

Parsedown

Parsedown is a very interesting technology. What it does is it attempts to act just like a person would when reading Markdown. It looks at the lines of code and after this, it tries to determine how the lines begin. This immediately allows to understand what block of data is for what and this enables Parsedown to perform several different actions. The main one of those is to read and watch out for special types of characters and be able to detect what data is an “inline” element within the blocks.

This approach is also known as line-based approach. Parsedown is the first type of parser of its kind to be using that technology. As soon as it has been released, not only Grav, but many other CMS platforms have shown interest in Parsedown:

• Laravel Framework
• Bolt CMS
• Herbie CMS
• Kirby CMS
• October CMS
• Pico CMS
• Statamic CMS
• phpDocumentor
• RaspberryPi.org
• Symfony Demo

Doctrine Cache

As you might have gotten the idea by now, caching is crucial for the speed and optimization of the site. Given that most developers tend to be pushed to overoptimize websites, speed has become a vital element. Here is where Doctrine Cache comes in to rescue the day – it aims to boost performance.

Already in its 2nd stage, Doctrine is something that programmers know as ORM – object-relational mapper for PHP 7.1+. It aims to boost performance by using Data Mapper, aiming to separate your domain logic from the business persistence in a database management system that is relational.

To put it more simply, the main benefit of Doctrine is to focus on a logical process that is object-based. This means that it assumes that persistence is only a secondary issue. There are several benefits to this and one of them is something that the Doctrine team calls “Entities”. These “entities” are basically PHP objects that have unique identifiers, known as “primary key”. The main idea here is to detect the PHP objects faster, so that performance can be increased. The process of Doctrine 2 is configured in a way that it won’t clone or implement an object, unless its key is valid, making it close to errorless.

Pimple Dependency Injection Container

Created for maintenance and stability, the Pimple Dependency Injection Container is a technology that is very crucial to having a stable CMS platform. It uses, just one Class and one Line and it can manage both services as well as parameters. Pimple has the following capabilities:

• Defining Services
• Defining Parameters
• Defining Shared Services
• Protecting Parameters
• Modifying services after creation
• Fetching the service creation function
• Packaging a Container for reusability

Symfony Event Dispatcher

Symfony Event Dispatcher is a plugin that has been created in order to be responsible for the handling of plugin events. The way it works is once a response object in a HttpKernel component (for example) has been created, it could be a plus to allow other elements to change headers and perform other modifications before the component is triggered. To allow this, the Symfony kernel introduces the kernel.response event. Its main goal is to perform the following actions:

The listener or a PHP object notifies the central dispatching object that it wants to listen to an event that is kernel.response.

The Symfony kernel tells the dispatcher component that it has to dispatch the event (kernel.response), passing it to an event object that has actual access to the Response object.

The dispatcher calls a method on (notifies) all of the listeners who want to tap into the kernel. response event, giving the ability to make mods to the Response object itself.

Symfony Console

The Symfony Console tech allows us to create different tasks via CLI (Command-Line Interface). These tasks include:

• Command-line commands.
• Recurring tasks.
• CronJobs.
  Imports.
• Batch-based jobs.

Gregwar Image Library

What is a CMS platform without smart image manipulation, after all and Grav is no exception. Here is where the Gregwar Image Library plays a role. The Gregwar Image Library uses two main image optimization commands:

• resize($width, $height, $background)
• scaleResize($width, $height, $background)
• forceResize($width, $height, $background)
• cropResize($width, $height, $background)
• zoomCrop($width, $height, $background, $xPos, $yPos)

And these are only the optimization components of the Gregwar Image Library. It has tons and tons of other image editing and processing tools that can crop, rotate and do whatever you please to perform when you want to traditionally edit an image.

References:

1. Grav Home Page for learning on its plugins and themes.
2. Wikipedia for understanding how the technology works.
3. Reddit for understanding user opinions and problems with the CMS.

Grav Review – Frequently Asked Questions