As I previously outlined in the Grav Version 1.1 Coming Soon blog post, there are many great improvements under the covers of the upcoming Grav 1.1 version. We now need your help to test these new features and functionality to ensure they are all working as intended and perform as advertised.

I wanted to take this opportunity to outline what we've been working on the past few months and provide some details on what you can expect in the upcoming releases. Since we released Grav 1.0 and the 1.0 version of the Admin Plugin 4 months ago, we have had 10 point releases. These primarily fo...

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...

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.

Today I'm really proud to announce the release of Grav 0.9.30 which has a huge new feature: Full Multi-Language Support. This is one of the top requested features for Grav and with the help of the Grav community to isolate possible approaches, Grav now has a very powerful tool-set to build multi-language sites. The great news is that we were able to implement this capability without impacting performance!

Another key feature of this release that was required for multi-language to work properly, is the ability to configure multiple routes for a page, support a default override, and even provide a canonical route to be used for SEO purposes.

Just over a week and a half after we made our beta 0.8.0 release available to the public, we are very pleased to announce the release of our latest 0.9.0 beta release. This is one of our biggest updates ever, and it contains lots of goodies! Read on to find out about what this release contains, and how the changes could potentially impact you!

The origins of Grav come from a personal desire to work with an open source platform that focused on speed and simplicity, rather than an abundance of built-in features that come at the expense of complexity.

There are plenty of great open source CMS platforms out there, including personal favorites Joomla and WordPress, as well as some really promising up-and-coming platforms like PageKit.

All of these platforms rely on a database for data persistence, are powerful, and offer a good degree of flexibility.