On the Delicious Brains blog they've posted the second part of their series sharing some self-hosted alternatives to WordPress for your CMS needs. In this new article they focus on Grav.

When I started the Self-Hosted WordPress Alternatives series in July with a review of Craft CMS, there were several comments asking what I thought of Grav – an open source flat-file CMS that also has a really cool looking website.

I had never heard of Grav before, but was immediately drawn to it for a few reasons. It’s open source, which is one of the things that I really love about WordPress since it enables a much larger community to work on the project. And since it’s a file-only CMS, there is no database to mess around with which in theory could make development and migrations easier in the long run.

The tutorial then walks you through the installation process and some examples of it in use (including screenshots of the UI). He also covers the core architecture of the tool, theme usage, SEO integration and eCommerce solutions that play well with Grav. He finishes the post looking at the quality of the current documentation and what kind of pricing and licensing Grav comes with.

On the SitePoint PHP blog author Bruno Skvorc continues his series about using the Grav flat-file CMS to create fast, simple sites. In his previous post he talked about the use of various "must have plugins". In this latest post he focuses more on some "tweaks" you can make to prepare your site for higher load.

We previously looked at some essential Grav plugins with which to round off the installation of a personal blog. In this post, we’ll take a look at some additional, advanced plugins, rounding it all off with an installation of Varnish for supercaching, taking performance to a whole new level.

His list of "tweaks" (and other plugins) that are recommended for a more robust site are:

• The "Related Pages" plugin
• An "assets" plugin for custom JS and CSS without extending the theme
• Simple search handling
• Comments on the content with the JsComments plugin
• Image Optimization and CDNs
• Caching with Varnish

All but the last item on the list are plugins you can drop in and configure pretty easily. Varnish requires a little extra setup, however, as it's an external service/software that needs to be running in front of your web server to do its job.

On the SitePoint PHP blog there's a new post from editor Bruno Skvorc sharing his list of top 8 plugins for Grav he sees as "must haves". Grav is a flat-file based content management system that uses modern PHP practices such as Composer packages, Makdown for content and YAML for configuration.

I recently switched my blog over from Blogger to Grav, and while quite a nifty platform on its own, Grav really shines once you prop it up with some custom themes and plugins.

This post will list the plugins I believe to be essential for a developer’s personal blog, and the reasons behind each suggestion.

Among the plugins on his list are options like:

• The Grav Admin panel
• Google Analytics integration
• External link functionality
• Code highlighting

He includes examples of what the output of each looks like when integrated into the site and how to get them installed and configured. Check out the remainder of the post for more in his list of suggestions.