Curious as to how Complex Grav is or Can be

So quick history:

• Started in 1996 (middle-grade) learning basic Static HTML sites (I found the internet fascinating).
• Never learned Java as at the time it was seen as sketchy. Even in high school (1999-2002) when I started to make websites for small business people didn't want Java. Also never learned it when people started to accept it.
• Eventually I moved to Joomla and used pre-made premium templates. But never learned to make my own.
• Started using WordPress using premium themes mostly from Envato. Never learned to make my own.

Thus here i am today not liking WordPress because:

• Outdated premium themes and plugins.
• My current WP theme is going to be updated to Elementor; I don't like it Elementor and the creator is going to abandon the version I use after the new version is released.
• Constant Admin Ads for the premium versions of Plugins displaying.
• Theme messages displaying a required plugin that is just recommended and never going away.

So I decided to take a HTML template I bought and try and mold it to a CMS:

• MODx - I found this surprisingly easy, but realized that I would have a BUNCH of areas to edit just for one single page. And some edits would still require editing the HTML. That was day one wasted.
• ClassicPress - So I decided to try this & found a YouTube video and began attempting to convert this HTML static site to ClassicPress. That was possibly four hours wasted.
• Joomla 5 - About 30min. in I decided I would rather use MODx

This lead me to just do a search for 'HTML Template to CMS' and one of the 1st items had to do with Grav CMS. And I even just thought of creating my own design and using that instead of a pre-made one (but will try both).

So do you think taking an existing HTML (Bootstrap, SASS, etc) Template and converting it to work with Grav would be less complicated, more, or equal to say Joomla, WordPress, etc.?

And no I'm not going to wait for an answer from anyone from this topic. Once done I'm going to follow a YouTube for installing Grav on a shared host (Host Gator) and try and install it and run it in WampServer and than perhaps try converting the homepage of the template (the template is called Wonted)

Your thoughts, ideas, suggestion, motivational speech are welcomed.

EDIT (4/27/2025 - 6:34pm PST)

Alright so I managed to get it to install and run with no issues on host & Wampserver. Did have a small issue in Wampserver with a bunch of Deprecated errors, but switching to PHP 8.3 (was originally using 8.4) fixed that. Now I'm going to watch a playlist on YouTube & than maybe search for a theme creation tutorial after.

PHP 3.3? 🧐 Seems there's something wrong with your setup. Current Grav should work fine on PHP 7.4-8.2

Good place to start would be learn.getgrav.org

I meant 8.3, my bad.

im not 100% sure if i understood right but if so and if template means theme at grav here is answer for you.
you can use any html-css-js code and create your page from zero or you can pick theme that others shared and use it or pick theme that others shared and build something by adding another things to it.
what i do is coding html, css, js, twig, yaml and using css libs, js libs to create web page parts and using grav to merge, connect, fuse, purge, reuse, etc etc so manage them.
grav gives many tools to help creating a website.

@Gin:
what i do is coding html, css, js, twig, yaml and using css libs, js libs to create web page parts and using grav to merge, connect, fuse, purge, reuse, etc etc so manage them.
grav gives many tools to help creating a website.

Yes, but I've noticed a lack of 'How To' created by users. Like If I wanted to know how to convert and HTML Template or create your own template/theme in Joomla, Drupal, or WordPress people have made such things. Most YouTube videos on Grav don't touch on it. And yes learn.getgrav.org is a base start, but so is WordPress or Joomla Documentation. They explain rather than show a usable/practical example.

This seems to be the current hurdle I see for Grav, many like it, but not enough to create guides on it like other CMS. Plenty of How to Install but beyond that I've found nothing helpful to speed up the learning curve.

I'm sure I'll figure it out. It will just be a slower process.

EDIT

Alright so I found some stuff I'll check out later:

• How to build your own theme for Grav CMS
• Building a Simple Grav CMS Theme with Twig, PHP, and CSS

@DevAuthor,

Yes, but I’ve noticed a lack of ‘How To’ created by users.

That's not surprising... According to some statistics, there are approx. 68 million Wordpress websites and 50 thousand Grav websites. A factor of 1300+.
Wordpress has got a huge development team, marketing department and writers.
The Grav team used to have 3 devs, of which 2 had to withdraw due to changing personal circumstances.

Having said that, having moved from Joomla, Wordpress to Grav myself, Grav felt like a breeze of fresh air:

• Modern framework as base,
• Simple architecture (only files, no DB),
• Bear bones code, no bloat.
• Simple theming using Twig templates
• Incredible performance
• etc.

I'm a fan because of its technology, not its marketing or community size.

About themes...
The links you have provided, are mere abstracts of the docs, nothing more. To get started with building your own custom theme, try the following:

• Install Grav
• Install plugin devtools: $ bin/gpm install devtools
• Create new plain theme: $ bin/plugin devtools newtheme
  • Follow the wizard
  • Choose 'pure blank' at the end of the wizard:
    TXTCopy

    Please choose an option:
    [pure-blank  ] Basic Theme using Pure.css
    [tailwind    ] Basic Theme using tailwind.css and including Alpine.js
    [tailwind-mix] Same as `tailwind` but more opinionated with Laravel Mix compiler
    [inheritance ] Inherit from another theme
    [copy        ] Copy another theme
    > pure-blank
    

• Tell Grav to use your new theme in user/config/system.yaml
  YAMLCopy

  pages:
  theme: mytheme
  

• You're now up and running with a basic theme infrastructure.
  • It generates HTML pages including a simple navigation bar
  • It shows how to include css and js files in Twig
  • It shows how to structure a theme folder
  • It shows how to structure Twig templates

Use it as a starting point and:

• Add your custom css
• Learn about themes from the docs
  • Basics
  • Tutorial
  • Twig
  • Variables
  • Etc.
• Tweak Twig to your liking
• Add more page templates
• Download other themes and learn how things are done
• etc.

Just my 2 cents...

@pamtbaau:
Twig templates

Yeah, that was pretty much the plan. That's how I learned HTML & CSS back in the day; just looking the source code to websites. It's just a more time consuming way of learning. Though I didn't think to look up 'Twig template tutorials'; definitely a decent amount of them.

As for the numbers game of big 'company' VS small 'company' in the end doesn't mean much given there are CMSs & Frameworks at the same size of Grav with far more resources available. So size or popularity is irrelevant.

Nevertheless, my plan is to simply use one of free themes to get my site back up and running and than learn to customize a look. I'm even taking the time to learn how to make WP themes for ClassicPress instead of relying on premium ones that may become outdated.

If you get to grips with how Grav puts pages together with twig templates- the 'partials' are great for dealing with how pages will behave - GRAV is a great system. I've recently had to put my head into a Wordpress site for somebody and found it overly complicated. Once you're used to power of markdown + twig it's incredibly versatile.

Thanks @pamtbaau for the detailed answer. I didn't know about the devtools plugin, it's wizard and templates, it's a great starting point to learn grav, I'll definitely use it next time I create a theme :)

To add my 2 cents answer on @DevAuthor's remarks, one reason I could see why one can find less tutorials for grav, apart from the smaller size of it's community, is that it's just so simple and intuitive that one doesn't feel the need for a tutorial, at least that's what I felt using it. Obviously it would still be great to have more tutorials available for it, that would make it even more easily accessible, but honestly when I started using grav I found myself really impressed at the fact that when I wanted to do something, I would think "what would be a simple way to do that" try it intuitively, and it would work, often without even having to look at the documentation.

I think with:

• basic notions of html-css
• understanding what is a templating system
• grav and twig docs

one can build for the first time a fully custom theme in a couple of hours/days (depending obviously on the complexity of what you want to do).
At least that's what I experienced with joy when I first used grav (after it taking me a month to achieve the same goals with another CMS).

That's my 2 cents, sorry for the long answer, hope it's of some use for anyone.