We've taken the plunge! The Creative Logic Tech Solution website is now fully powered by Grav! We've taken our current site powered by WordPress and fully rebuilt using Grav CMS. Not only that, we also tweaked and improved both the design and functionality along the way. The plan was never to change the design or functionality but rather just rebuild it in Grav, but we just couldn't help ourselves because if we see things that can be improved we simply have to make that improvement. #driven #excellence
So why did we go to the trouble of rebuilding our fairly new website in Grav? Good question. I can't say there weren't moments of hesitation, it was a fairly large undertaking, but in the end it was easily worth it. Aside from the clear key benefits of Grav, such as security and most importantly speed, we felt it was a great way to promote our Grav capabilities. It is also a case study in converting a WordPress1 driven site to Grav. In recreating an existing website there is much to be learned. Because we didn't have to think about design at all, we could focus more on just the pure code side of things and as such get deeper into it.
We learned a lot in the process and below are a few of our key takeaways:
- Grav is awesome! There's good reason it has been an award winning CMS from the start.
- The freedom and flexibility afforded by working with a flat file CMS such as Grav are eye and mind opening.
- While Grav is often looked at as "less powerful" than the big database drives CMSs, it actually has some amazing and key functionality (hello on the fly image cropping!!)
- We can't wait to work with Grav again. Hint hint to you the reader...
If you want your developer focusing on just writing good code and getting important work done rather than getting held up dealing with the complexities and security concerns of a database driven website, then it's time to get your Grav on. Contact us and we can get talking about it!
Overall, we could summarize this post and our thoughts on Grav with a short sentence or two, but I think we could use a picture instead. They say a picture is worth a thousand words, however this one might only say a few. Nevertheless, it very much sums up how we feel...
1 WordPress is great too, we like it still. We've been building sites in WP for over 10 years, around the time of WP 3.0. Back then we had to still convince people it was even a true CMS at all not just for blogging.
