---
title: 'What is Grav?'
media_order: 'Grav-dashboard.png.png,juan_avataaars.jpg'
primaryImage: Grav-dashboard.png.png
visible: true
taxonomy:
    category:
        - About
    tag:
        - tag3
        - tag1
    author:
        - 'Juan Villén'
avatarImage: juan_avataaars.jpg
show_pageimage: true
image_width: 1038
image_height: 300
---

Grav is a **Fast**, **Simple**, and **Flexible** file-based Web-platform. There is **Zero** installation required.  Just extract the ZIP archive, and you are already up and running.  Although Grav follows principles similar to other flat-file CMS platforms, it has a different design philosophy than most.
The name **Grav** is just a shortened version of the word **Gravity**. The shared namespace of our platform and a movie starring Sandra Bullock is pure coincidence! More importantly, gravity is also a fundamental physical principle that describes the forces of attraction between objects. Frankly, the name was chosen as a temporary "codename" for the project, and it just stuck.
The underlying architecture of Grav is built using well established and _best-in-class_ technologies. This is to ensure that Grav is simple to use and easy to extend. Some of these key technologies include:
* [Twig Templating](https://twig.symfony.com/): for powerful control of the user interface
* [Markdown](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Markdown): for easy content creation
* [YAML](https://yaml.org): for simple configuration
* [Parsedown](https://parsedown.org/): for fast Markdown and Markdown Extra support
* [Doctrine Cache](https://www.doctrine-project.org/projects/doctrine-orm/en/2.6/reference/caching.html): for performance
* [Pimple Dependency Injection Container](https://pimple.symfony.com/): for extensibility and maintainability
* [Symfony Event Dispatcher](https://symfony.com/doc/current/components/event_dispatcher.html): for plugin event handling
* [Symfony Console](https://symfony.com/doc/current/components/console.html): for CLI interface
* [Gregwar Image Library](https://github.com/Gregwar/Image): for dynamic image manipulation
## Grav's Place in the Universe
There are many powerful open source CMS solutions for building complex websites.  Some of the more commonly used ones are [Joomla](https://joomla.org), [WordPress](https://wordpress.org), and [Drupal](https://drupal.org). The downside of these platforms is that they have a steep learning curve associated with them. This requires a significant amount of your time - and this may be the time that you do not have.
These platforms provide a wealth of features and functionality that you can extend with a wide variety of open source and proprietary plug-ins and themes.  These extensions and themes are themselves often feature-packed, requiring more knowledge and time on the part of the developer yet.
In the end, you often find yourself creating a website that requires many plugins and extensions from many different vendors. This can make your design overly complicated and difficult to maintain over the long term.
Grav tackles the problem differently.  It focuses primarily on your content and turns your content structure into a navigable site.  The underpinnings of Grav are simple, yet via extensive **events**, you have complete control over every step in the Grav workflow.
This solution allows simple plugins to quickly and easily add powerful functionality. Using **Grav** also leads to a rapid development environment with an installation process that takes seconds, including a straightforward content creation method with a minimal learning curve. All of this contributes to making Grav friendly to the designer, the developer, and the end user.
To get a basic site up-and-running requires minimal Web development experience. If you dig a little deeper, you will discover that there is very little Grav cannot accomplish.