My first impresion on installing Grav

Hello folks, I have never used grav before and I'd like to share my first time impression on installing grav. Hopefully it will be useful for the developer to improve the app

1. Downloading the grav is easy. After extracted the package the folder structure scared me a bit, I though it's abit bloated and started to think it’s not for average users

2. Then I tried to install it, some php error is bugging me and searching the forum for

Fatal error: Call to undefined function Symfony\Component\Yaml\ctype_digit() vendor/symfony/yaml/Inline.php on line 124 doesn’t returned any results thread even it’s actually already discussed before.

I finally found the solution by browsing the 'installation' section on the forum and luckily I found one post related to my problem in the page 1

1. The installation screen is quite impressive, it’s flat and have a modern feel, but the complexity of password’s complex strings requirement abit annoying me for installing it on localhost. Yeah, I usually using admin:admin when testing installing stuffs on my local machine

2. Ok, the success full page teach me that skeleton is a quickstart, I was abit confusing about the terminology and downloading a skeleton tell me what it is. IMO it’s abit misleading to use word 'skeleton' for it.

3. I tried to install a new theme by copying folder from the skeleton I downloaded before and then headed to grav admin. Activating the new theme is quite easy. Anyway because it’s advertised as a modern cms, I was expecting the settings was saved in real time (ajaxed) when I switch the config, instead of clicking the save button above.

4. Still in admin page, I was heading to plugin page and found there’s an update for admin plugin. Just wondering why a latest package doen’t have all latest package, I thought it may be to demontrate the update function. But here it is, I got this error when clicking the update button : Whoops \ Exception \ ErrorException (E_ERROR) COPY Class 'ZipArchive' not found. I didn't want to found out what is happened at the time, so I just skipped it

5. I headed back to grav installation’s succesful page then following the instruction to create a new page.It’s simple and easy. And as a bonus, to change the menu’s title is easy too.

6. That's all. Now I will start to play with themes and probably will create another post about it.

Thanks! keep up the good work.

Nice!

Thanks for the constructive feedback! A couple replies:

1. Ensuring a high standard of the passwords is what helps making a platform secure in the first place, as you’d likely migrate your amdin/admin password to production without warning since deploying does just involve moving files. We’d likely avoid that possibility.

2. On the skeletons page we have "A Grav skeleton is an all-in-one package containing the core Grav system plus sample pages, plugins, configuration. These packages are a great way to get started with Grav.
   Simply download the ZIP file, extract it in your web-root, and you are ready to start using Grav!"
   I feel that’s a pretty precise description if you read it. Which word would you suggest instead?

3. You PHP version does not come with the zip extension. It’s a problem caused by the AMMPS configuration

Hi flaviocopes,

@flaviocopes

1. Ensuring a high standard of the passwords is what helps making a platform secure in the first place, as you’d likely migrate your amdin/admin password to production without warning since deploying does just involve moving files. We’d likely avoid that possibility.

yeah, it was just the lazy me. following the latest standard is always a good move

@flaviocopes

1. On the skeletons page we have “A Grav skeleton is an all-in-one package containing the core Grav system plus sample pages, plugins, configuration. These packages are a great way to get started with Grav.
   Simply download the ZIP file, extract it in your web-root, and you are ready to start using Grav!”
   I feel that’s a pretty precise description if you read it.

ok, it maybe was just me scroling the page too fast. But regarding the wording, I think 'skeleton' leads to something that more 'structural' than dummy data / starter. It also reminds me of getskeleton framework which is more related to something about theming/templating.

@flaviocopes
Which word would you suggest instead?
I have some wordings in mind : bundle, starter, box, set, suite

Anyway, why don't use discourse for the forum platform? I thinks it more manageable and also more searchable.

This forum is hosted and we don't need to do any maintenance on it, which is a good thing.

I suggested Discourse too previously, but it's built on a completely unrelated platform that would need to be managed separately. https://github.com/flarum/flarum would be a better fit for us, but it's not a priority I think.
The downside of the current platform is we don't "own" the current forum, but we can live with it now.

I hope one day someone will come up with a nice Grav forum plugin :)

Some good observations there. Most of your server ones are very specific to Ammps. From my experience most LAMP stacks have these things enabled by default. On my mac, I prefer to use Brew to install PHP and all the extra bits I might need.