Feedback & Question Regarding Admin UI / Future Direction

[HoloBack]

Hi there,

we have been using GRAV for several years now across multiple projects, and overall it has proven to be a very powerful, reliable and well-architected CMS. From a technical and performance standpoint, it has been an excellent choice for us.

One aspect we wanted to share some feedback on is the admin UI/UX. In our opinion, this is currently the only area where GRAV feels slightly behind modern expectations, especially for high-end, design-driven projects. A more minimalistic, refined and premium interface—similar to the approach taken by Statamic—would significantly elevate the overall experience.

This leads us to two questions:
• Is a UI/UX refresh of the admin interface planned or on the roadmap?
• Or would you recommend that teams with higher UI requirements customize or redesign the admin interface themselves?

Additionally, we believe that a GRAV Pro / paid licensing model (not just the plugins, for example, offering premium admin UI, enhanced tooling, or advanced features) could be an interesting way to fund and accelerate further development in this area, while keeping the core philosophy of GRAV intact.

We wanted to share this feedback respectfully, as GRAV has otherwise been an excellent foundation for our work, and we see a lot of potential for it to grow even further.

Thank you for your time, and for the great work on GRAV.

[rhukster]

Hi, a new admin is on the horizon, but it's a HUGE undertaking and I'm currently on a team of one. The thought of "admin-pro" or whatever being a premium plugin does have some appeal as it could pay me back for developing it. I have a lot going on right now with the new Grav premium licensing system I just built, Grav 1.8 beta needed to get released, various premium themes and plugins about to be released (Helios, YetiSearch, Forms-Pro), catching up on GitHub issues and support issues for the 100+ plugins I manage, etc.

In regards to the admin itself, is it just a shadcdn-style UI and probably a more 'reactive' interface what you are looking for? Is there missing functionality?

Cheers,

[HoloBack]

Hi @rhukster,

thanks a lot for the open and honest insight — totally understandable, especially as a one-person team with so many parallel initiatives.

From our point of view, a commercial Pro model similar to Statamic would actually make a lot of sense: for example a GRAV Pro version in the range of $100–200 per year, potentially with paid yearly updates. Paid Pro plugins are absolutely reasonable as well.
Even though GRAV started as open source, that doesn’t necessarily mean it has to remain purely free forever — a paid tier could significantly increase competitiveness and, most importantly, accelerate progress in areas like the admin experience.

Regarding the admin UI: Statamic is a solid reference, but after further research we came across Directus CMS, which from a UI/UX perspective feels like a completely different level. That kind of modern, refined, highly responsive interface is what we would consider “best in class” for a next-generation GRAV admin. Functionality-wise, we’re already very happy with GRAV — this is really about polish, clarity and experience.

The only recurring pain point on our side is the Warm Cache plugin, especially with media-heavy pages or when Cloudflare is involved — processes can occasionally abort or behave inconsistently. That said, we’re aware this is largely due to technical and infrastructural limitations rather than a conceptual flaw.

Hope this feedback is helpful, and thanks again for the impressive amount of work you’re pushing forward.

Cheers

[rhukster]

yes, that's quite an attractive UI. I've done several plugins now with HTMX (https://htmx.org) which addresses much of my long-term concern with moving to a purely JS-based admin like most CMSes have moved to.

Basically it can still work with server-side rendered elements, but those elements can be smaller blocks and they can be updated on the page without the whole page reloading. This produces an SPA feel (think react style), while still allowing plugins to extend the admin which is I a key functionality of Grav.

The other main issue with a new admin is all the plugins out there that do anything 'custom', like having their admin 'area', will break. There's no way to really get around this as they have been tailored to work with the current admin UI. Many premium plugins I've built utilize this and I really need to solve how that should be handled before proceeding. They may all need to be reworked to support the new admin, but supporting both at the same time is preferred, but much harder to solve.