HibbittsDesignGrav Open Publishing Space
Full CMS
Grav Open Publishing Space is a free, open-source site for open guides and books – course readers, handbooks, short open textbooks and other OER (open educational resources) – with a blog and almost any other Grav page alongside them. It’s a ready-to-run Grav CMS skeleton package, with Markdown file-based content and a browser-based Admin panel, and no database.
Your guide is stored as ordinary Markdown files, one per page – edit them in the Admin panel or work with the files directly through Git. Want a dedicated reading site later? Guides move to Grav Helios Open Reader unchanged. Grav CMS Projects at a Glance shows every Grav project, free and Premium Helios.
Jump to: What Sets It Apart · Coming from Pressbooks · See It in Action
Who It’s For
- Educators publishing open guides, course readers, handbooks and short open textbooks
- Open publishers who want a guide or book at the centre, with a blog and other pages around it
- Anyone who wants a free, fully open-source site with no licence to buy
- Individuals or teams that want a version-controlled, GitHub or Codeberg workflow
Built for Open Publishing and Learning
A guide or book with a clear section structure, on a full Grav site – giving readers a comfortable reading experience and authors room for everything else.
- Comfortable reading – section cards, parts, reading progress, and a Previous/Next bar at the bottom of the screen on phones
- Find your way around – a search box on each guide (the / key jumps to it), and with the Page TOC plugin, the sections of each page in the side list
- Learning content built in – Learning Objectives, callout boxes, badges, image captions and an A–Z topics index
- Images that work on phones – tap any image shown smaller than its full size to see it larger
- More than one guide – a Guides page with a card for each guide on the site (multi-guide demo)
- A full site around it – a ready-to-go blog with featured posts, tags, archives & Atom/RSS feeds, plus standard, multi-section and modular pages
- LMS-friendly embedding – a URL parameter displays only the page content inside Canvas, Moodle or Brightspace
- Light, Dark & Auto modes – on Quark 2, Grav 2’s modern theme (Quark for Grav 1.7), with English, French and German
What Sets It Apart
- Readers never lose their place – Keep My Place remembers the last page and the part of it the reader had reached, and offers a Continue Reading link when they return (stored in their own browser)
- Present straight from the guide – the arrow keys move between pages, handy when sharing your screen
- Reuse built in – a “This page as Markdown” link on every page, and an optional full text version of each guide (Grav 2 version)
- Moves to Premium Helios unchanged – the same core page types and settings as Grav Helios Open Reader, so guides can move between the two
- No build pipeline, ever – edit in the browser-based Admin panel and changes go live immediately
- Ready for the 5Rs, no extra step – plain Markdown means your content is already ready to retain, reuse, revise, remix, and redistribute
Coming from Pressbooks
The companion Pressbooks Converter (Beta) turns a Pressbooks XHTML export into an Open Publishing Space starting point – sections, chapters, learning objectives, captioned images, cover image, license and OER attribution, for you to review and refine (see a converted book). Choose Pressbooks instead when print-ready PDF or EPUB output is central to your workflow, or your institution offers a hosted, supported Pressbooks network.
Behind the Scenes
- Markdown files, not a database – your content runs on simple text files, easier to back up, version control, and migrate than database-driven platforms
- Open collaborative authoring – Git Sync keeps your files and live site matched, with “Edit this Page” links back to the Markdown source
- Free and open source – MIT licensed, on free, open-source Grav themes; runs on Grav 2 (PHP 8.3+), with a Grav 1.7 version (PHP 8.0.2+)
Why Grav CMS?
A mature, stable platform that just completed its biggest release yet – Grav 2 brings the completely new Admin 2 panel, a built-in API, AI-ready content and workflows, and support for the latest PHP versions. File-based content you fully control, no database required, and updates go live immediately with no build process required. Ten years on, 15.7k+ GitHub stars, and built for what’s next.
On Grav 2, even this free project gets the completely new Admin 2 panel, plus Grav 2’s Markdown output behind the “This page as Markdown” link and the full text version of each guide.
What’s Included
- The Open Education Essentials example guide, in two parts, with a cover image, learning objectives and OER attribution
- A blog with example posts, and standard, multi-section and modular example pages
- A Guides page and a placeholder Sample Guide, unpublished, ready to turn on for a site with more than one guide
- A Read Me page describing every setting
See It in Action
Ready for a Dedicated Reading Site?
Grav Helios Open Reader is the Grav Premium Helios step up: a dedicated reading site for one or several publications, with a table of contents beside every page and Helios’s app-like design. It needs the Grav Premium Helios theme ($50 per site), which funds Grav’s own development, and your guides move across unchanged.
Questions, Help, or Customization?
Questions, ideas, or curious how this might fit your course, OER project, or publication? Feel free to get in touch. If you’d like more hands-on support with setup, theming, content structure, or workflow design, see Additional Professional Services & Support. Migrating existing content? Discover Grav Converters. Looking to build a site for one or more courses instead? Discover Grav Open Course Hub.