Will RocketThemes Develop On Grav?

[bobrocke]

To what extent does RocketThemes expect to develop on Grav?

I would think that some appropriate client, or in-house, work would serve to speed Grav's development. You know, dog food.

Bob

[rhukster]

We definitely plan on providing RocketTheme theme support in Grav. We have already been developing Gantry5 (our template framework) so that it works with a variety of platforms, one of those is Grav.

We also have plans of our own to use Grav where appropriate. It makes a fantastic platform for doing documentation, and I can see us using it for the new Gantry website in the near term.

[bobrocke]

Good deal! Since Grav is new, it's going to have its work cut out for it catching up to the likes of Statamic and Kirby (which as version 2 on the doorstep). But with RocketThemes behind it, and developing on it, it will stand a chance.

Competition is a good thing; it will be fun to see Grav 0.9 and 1.0 and...

[rhukster]

There are pluses and minuses to the situation.

On the plus side:

1. We have no legacy code to deal with. Most existing platforms have been developed over many years, and that generally means they were built with older development principals, outdated PHP design patterns etc. Grav was designed using the latest technologies, and latest design principals for modern versions of PHP.
2. We are able to see what's been done in other platforms, and take the opportunity to improve on them. Cherry picking elements of each platform we think was implemented well, and reinventing them, making them easier, faster, more efficient.
3. Adding unique ideas that are not in any existing platform such as our efficient and super-powerful event model that lets plugins do pretty much anything. Or our efficient yet extremely flexible configuration system, and other secret-sauce type stuff :)

And the minuses:

1. We have to build our infrastructure, deal with the inevitable early bugs, etc.
2. We may not have feature parity with other platforms yet. Probably the biggest missing element is our admin panel not being ready yet, or multi-language support, but they are definitely coming.

In short, we did look at every viable platform before we even started Grav, and found them impressive, but wanting in one form or another. We decided that there was a place for something like Grav among these other well established and quality platforms. And if we came to that conclusion, surely others will do also?

[bobrocke]

Another plus, that I think you pointed out in another thread, is that Grav has RocketThemes behind it. Statamic and Kirby have very small development teams that have to handle development as well as ongoing support. With RocketThemes using Grav, as well as developing it, advances may well come faster.

[rhukster]

This is true, we are getting ready to release 0.9.0 which basically has taken 1 week for us to get to from our initial 0.8.0 release. And this is by no means a small release, it's got some major updates and advancements. Most admittedly are under the covers, better techniques and approaches to some things, but also some new user features like the asset management stuff and also improvements like media functionality right in the image markup tag.