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.

Standard Free & Paid Pro Versions

If you have been following the blog, twitter, slack chat etc, you probably already know now that our intention is to provide two versions.

The standard free version which we are making available today, is actually still very powerful, and has more functionality than most commercial flat-file CMS systems.

We also intend to release in the near future a more feature-rich pro version that will have enhanced functionality and some additional nice-to-have capabilities. This pro version will be a paid plugin the price of which is not yet 100% finalized.

Support

We have tested internally, but we hope to use this public beta phase to identify, isolate, and fix issues related to the plugin to ensure it is as solid and reliable as possible.

For live chatting, please use the dedicated Slack Chat Room for dicussions directly related to the admin plugin.

For bugs, features, improvements, please ensure you create issues in the admin plugin GitHub repository.

Features

Standard Admin (available today)

This is a summary list of the features and functionality of the standard admin plugin:

• User login with automatic password encryption
• Forgot password functionality
• Logged-in-user management
• Dashboard with maintenance status, site activity and latest page updates
• Ajax-powered backup capability
• Ajax-powered clear-cache capability
• System configuration management
• Site configuration management
• Normal and Expert modes which allow editing via forms or YAML
• Page listing with filtering and search
• Page creation, editing, moving, copying, and deleting
• Powerful syntax highlighting code editor with instant Grav-powered preview
• Editor features, hot keys, toolbar, and distraction-free fullscreen mode
• Drag-n-drop upload of page media files including drag-n-drop placement in the editor
• One click Grav core updates
• One click theme and plugin updates
• Plugin manager that allows listing and configuration of installed plugins
• Theme manager that allows listing and configuration of installed themes
• GPM-powered installation of new plugins and themes

Screenshots

What's Currently Missing

We have several things we want to add to the standard version before it's totally feature-complete:

• Standard multi-language support - The ability to switch between languages and edit pages in a particular language
• Translation of the admin into multiple languages (after admin is stable)
• Support for Editor toolbar buttons
• Better mobile support
• Documentation on http://learn.getgrav.org

Pro Admin (coming soon)

The Pro version will build on top of the Standard version, but add the following:

• Admin UI customization of colors and logo
• Advanced editor with buttons for linked pages and media + more
• Media manager
• User manager
• ACL manager
• Backup manager (list, restore, remove backup files)
• Detailed statistics
• Log manager (list and viewing of log files)
• Multi-language editor for custom translations

Installation & Setup

First ensure you are running the latest Grav 0.9.34 or later. This is required for the admin plugin to run properly (-f forces a refresh of the GPM index).

$ bin/gpm selfupgrade -f

The admin plugin actually requires the help of 3 other plugins, so to get the admin plugin to work you first need to install admin, login, forms, and email plugins. These are available via GPM, and because the plugin has dependencies you just need to proceed and install the admin plugin, and agree when prompted to install the others:

$ bin/gpm install admin

Creating a User

With Grav 0.9.36, you can now create a user account with the CLI:

$ bin/plugin login new-user

Simply follow along with the prompts to create the user account.

Alternatively, you can create a user/accounts/admin.yaml file manually. This filename is actually the username that you will use to login. The contents will contain the other information for the user.

password: 'password'
email: '[email protected]'
fullname: 'Johnny Appleseed'
title: 'Site Administrator'
access:
  admin:
    login: true
    super: true

Of course you should edit your email, password, fullname, and title to suit your needs.

By default you can access the admin by pointing your browser to http://yoursite.com/admin. Here you simply log in with the username and password you entered above.