Wow what a great year 2015 was! We made huge strides last year with our Grav 1.0 final release and the release of many new plugins and themes including our widely anticipated Admin plugin. We also were nominated for Best Free CMS on CMS Critic's annual People's Choice CMS awards. Grav 1.0 w...

Ever since we added support for multi-language and translations in the beta releases of Grav, we have been asked about translating Grav into various languages. This has typically been centered around the Admin plugin as that has the most translation strings and subsequently is the most common focus of translation needs.

Up until this point, the process of translation involved Forking the plugin repository on GitHub, making edits or additions in the various languages, then submitting a pull request. This worked OK at first, but as the plugin became more complex, more strings were getting added, it became harder and harder to manage. We needed a better solution. Enter Crowdin to the rescue!

! We have decided to change the minimum requirements for Grav from PHP 5.4.40 to 5.5.9 to stay in line with the new minimum version of some of our key vendor libraries.

As is typical with these kinds of things, We launched Grav 1.0 right around the same time that PHP 7.0 was released, and everything seemed great. Even though Grav runs amazingly on PHP 7.0 there are some PHP 7.0 compatibility issues within some of the vendor libraries that Grav relies upon.

These external libraries are continually updated and have started dropping support for older EOL (End of Life) versions of PHP. In order to continue using the latest versions of these libraries and support the new PHP 7.0, we need to keep our requirements in line with our key libraries. Grav currently supports PHP 5.4 which was an actively supported version when we started developing Grav, but is no longer supported according to the PHP Supported Versions document.

I had originally planned on penning a blog post about how easy it is to setup and deploy a Grav site with ServerPilot with DigitalOcean. While that is a fantastic VPS service, someone on Gitter asked me about setting up Grav on Amazon's AWS, so I checked it out. What I found was pretty amazing. Even the free tier of the EC2 t2.micro package runs Grav like a boss! Combine this with awesome automated setup and server management via ServerPilot, and you have the makings of an unbeatable combination. In this blog post I'll go through step-by-step on how to get this setup on your own. The hardest part is setting up EC2 as it's a bit ungainly, but other than that it's a doddle, and more importantly, it's free!

Grav 1.0 has been released! This major milestone in Grav’s ongoing story and comes after a year and a half of open development, extensive user testing including over 51,000 downloads, and overwhelmingly positive feedback by our growing community.

Grav started out as a passion-project with the goal of creating a flat-file CMS that was open source, fast, and exceedingly simple. We wanted to create something that could be configured and optimized to meet virtually any situation from simple one-page sites to complex multi-language blogs.

During the past year, Grav has grown from a simple, small project to a leading choice for Web developers seeking a flat-file CMS. Its plugins library now features 85 free plugins that expand on Grav’s core functionality, enabling it to do extraordinary things. Currently 40 free themes can be downloaded and installed in an instant, absolutely free!

Download Grav 1.0

And, Grav is just getting started...

Over the past weekend, the Grav project surpassed 3,000 stars on GitHub! This is a huge achievement for the Grav team, serving as a testament of the incredible community that has grown over the past year around a new open source flat-file CMS.

Grav is still a very young content management system...

In the past few releases of Grav we have implemented Nonces (Numbers used only once) to secure forms and actions against CSRF attacks. We missed a few actions, and have adjusted our Nonce generation mechanism to be more performant.

However, the downside of this development is that it has caused some issues with some areas of the Admin to stop functioning until fixed. One of these actions that was missed previously was the Update buttons. This of course has caused a problem for upgrading Grav. But, not to fear, there is a simple solution!

After being in beta for just over a year, with nearly 50 releases and 250 closed issues, Grav is now a full featured CMS with all our roadmap tasks completed. We really could of put the Version 1.0 rubber stamp on Grav some time ago, but we decided to hold off until we had the admin plugin stable also. With an extensive beta development phase of it's own, the Grav admin has undergone a series of solid releases to add new functionality and address bugs. It is also on the cusp of getting a stable version number as we have 161 closed issues and no critical bugs currently open.

I know this is the news that a huge majority of Grav users have been waiting for. Yes, you read correctly, the Standard Admin plugin that has been so-long promised, is available for beta testing!

!!!! WARNING, WARNING, this is an important WARNING! Please understand this is a beta version, and we cannot 100% guarantee that this plugin will not mess up your data.

This is an HTML user interface that provides a convenient way to configure Grav and easily create and modify pages. This will remain a totally optional plugin, and is not in any way required or needed to use Grav effectively. In fact, the admin provides an intentionally limited view to ensure it remains easy to use and not overwhelming. I'm sure power users will still prefer to work with the configuration files directly.