When we planned to create a simple shop skeleton to provide a demonstration of Grav being used to display products in categories, we came across a really interesting hosted shopping cart solution called SnipCart that integrates into your site with a few lines of JavaScript, CSS and some buy buttons.

In order to showcase what can be done with Grav and how easy it all is, we created a simple, yet rather elegant Grav plugin that wraps SnipCart and integrates easily with Grav.

The origins of Grav come from a personal desire to work with an open source platform that focused on speed and simplicity, rather than an abundance of built-in features that come at the expense of complexity.

There are plenty of great open source CMS platforms out there, including personal favorites Joomla and WordPress, as well as some really promising up-and-coming platforms like PageKit.

All of these platforms rely on a database for data persistence, are powerful, and offer a good degree of flexibility.