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!

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.

In case you have not been following the updates in the Plugins page, or our Twitter feed, I thought I would take this opportunity to showcase a few of cool plugins that have been added recently. We'll cover Embed, CacheBuster, MediaEmbed, and Private.

In some of my earlier blog posts, I outlined the process of setting up a local development environment which involves installing and configuring up a web-server with PHP. This process can become second nature, and is the preferred approach for many developers, but utilizing a web-based IDE is a new option that has many surprising benefits.

Web IDEs have been around for a few years, but only recently with the improvement in browser capabilities, more sophisticated editor capabilities, and the integration of virtual machines, have them become a viable option. For years I watched from afar, and scoffed at being able to do any real development in such an environment, but after a recent round of testing, I have come away impressed!

Read on to find out the many benefits and a walk-through of getting a powerful Grav development environment setup for free!

Grav is already one of the fastest CMS options available, but it's possible to easily transform your Grav-based site into a world-class performer. A CDN or Content Delivery Network and some new Grav features can make this possible.

It has been a little over 10 months since we launched the first public beta of Grav. We quickly reached our 0.9.0 release goals as outlined in the Grav Roadmap, and have spent the subsequent months bug fixing, adding requested features, and laying the groundwork for our upcoming 1.0.0 release.

Going through the issues on the Grav GitHub repository, I noticed someone was asking for Grav to support Retina images and immediately thought this is my chance to start contributing to this awesome project. As per suggested in the comments, I quickly came up with a solution using the new srcset a...

A common question has been raised a few times on the forum, and it usually goes something like this:

"With traditional CMS platforms such as Joomla, WordPress, Drupal, etc, I can easily change themes and my site is instantly transformed. How does this work in Grav?"

In an effort to answer this question, I will endeavor to provide some of the fundamental operating paradigms behind traditional CMS platforms and how Grav's approach turns them on their heads.

I was asked on our Slack chat the other day about the best way to debug Grav plugins. I started to type out my process but quickly realized it would be better to show rather than tell. Yesterday I did a quick 30 minute Google Hangout and because it was of the Air variety, it also recorded it for posterity on YouTube.