Along with our new 0.9.0 release, we have also released three new plugins. The Archives plugin is used for displaying a list of months that can filter pages based on taxonomy. The GitHub plugin provides an easy way to access the GitHub API from Grav, either directly in plugins or in Twig templates. TwigCache is a plugin for advanced users that are trying to include slow requests or processing in their Twig template output.

Just over a week and a half after we made our beta 0.8.0 release available to the public, we are very pleased to announce the release of our latest 0.9.0 beta release. This is one of our biggest updates ever, and it contains lots of goodies! Read on to find out about what this release contains, and how the changes could potentially impact you!

Now that Grav is out in the wild as a Beta Release, I'de like to take this opportunity to outline what our plans are. Grav is already powering several sites and we wanted to make the core, some skeletons, and of course plugins available to those that want to check it out. However, Grav is not complete and there are several key areas we intend to focus on in the near future. So on to the Roadmap!

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.