Grav has received the 2016 CMS Critic award for Best Open Source CMS thanks to our wonderful community. This award comes during a year of explosive growth for Grav, with over 5,400 people giving it a star on GitHub, and 1,500 hanging out in the Grav chatroom.

The CMS Critic awards have been around for a few years now, and they serve as a great snapshot of the best content management solutions available in a number of different areas.

This year, Grav was nominated in three categories, including:

• Best Blogging Software
• Best Open Source CMS
• Best CMS for Education

Receiving the award for Best Open Source CMS is a great honor for the development team. This project has been our passion for nearly three years. The number of folks out there that took the time to cast their vote is inspiring. We are extremely grateful.

The Grav community is incredible. They’ve been with us since the beginning helping with testing, sending in ideas, and even submitting their own improvements. It wouldn’t be where it is without them.

We’d like to acknowledge ProcessWire and Bolt, two excellent CMS options that were nominated in the Best Open Source CMS category.

Congratulations goes to Cascade who received the award for Best CMS for Education and Bolt CMS for being named Best Blogging Software.

What’s Next for Grav

Many of the same team members that created Grav are also behind Gantry, an open source theming framework that currently works with WordPress and Joomla. That team has been working on bringing the powerful Gantry 5 framework to Grav.

Because the same team is behind both of these projects, they share a common structure and user experience. This makes them a natural fit for one-another.

It also gives Grav the ability to become an even more versatile CMS. For a lot of content management systems, having one or more solid theming frameworks can make a big difference in user and developer adoption. It makes life easier for not only the developer creating the website but for the user, as well.

You can actually try Gantry 5 out on Grav right now by downloading the plugin and one or more of its free themes, Helium and Hydrogen, and take part in our beta test.

There is still some work to be done so while it isn’t ready for a live production sight just yet, it will give you an idea of just how powerful a theme built on Gantry 5 for Grav can be.

We will share more information about Gantry 5 for Grav as more details become available.