Exploring and Building Open [Source] Software for Tech-savvy Educators and OER Publishers

With Grav being a flat-file (no database) CMS tech-savvy educators have a wider range of possible development and deployment options for their Grav Course Hubs than most other database-driven systems. Recently I’ve been exploring an on-line alternative to my currently preferred local development approach, so I thought I would share both together for easier comparison. Both approaches will let you safely develop and test your Grav site before deploying changes to a live production server.

After my first Grav CMS for Educators Workshop it became apparent I should provide a wider range of options for how Web-savvy instructors can install and set up the flat-file CMS Grav, especially when using my ready-to-run Course Hub package.

Here is a quick sampling of some Grav CMS Course Companion workflows:

Video 1. Simple install of the course companion on a Web server (in under 30 seconds).

As a modern flat-file CMS, Grav can take full advantage of today’s ecosystem of open and collaborative editing services, such as GitHub or GitLab. In this article we will look at how to easily use Grav with GitHub Desktop (which uses GitHub and Git for source control) and the automatic deployment service Deploy to result in a very efficient, open and collaborative workflow. No scripting or command line interactions will be required, I promise.

Recently, I’ve been exploring ways to use the modern flat-file CMS Grav as a simple open publishing tool. Grav is a natural candidate for this usage, as all content is stored as individual files which can be stored on a variety of open and collaborative editing environments (e.g. GitHub).

While every project has different needs, I am finding that database-based CMS platforms such as WordPress are often too complex/feature-laden for the needs of individual educators/publishers. In contrast, flat-file CMS platforms offer more simplicity and control. Here are some of the key reasons I am now focusing on using modern flat-file CMSs for my development work (especially when implementing a flipped LMS approach):

But first, what does the term ‘flat-file CMS’ mean? In a nutshell, content is stored as individual text files rather than in a database.

The fact that a flat-file CMS uses files vs. database is secondary: the game changer is the ECOSYSTEM available, i.e. GitHub, Markdown, etc.

— Hibbitts Design (@...