We love Grav. We also love not opening seventeen partials to move one hero paragraph. Grav MUD is the compromise Andy didn't ask for and might secretly respect — structured layout in plain text, compiled on onPageContentRaw, themed with normal CSS.
The problem we kept hitting
Agency sites. Product promos. Exposé journalism (hi, Lone Mamber). Every time the pattern was the same:
- Markdown for prose — great.
- Twig for layout — fine until you maintain it at 2 a.m.
- Page builders — fast until the JSON in the database becomes a hostage situation.
We wanted something humans could read in Git, LLMs could edit without hallucinating template paths, and Grav could still cache like Grav.
What MUD actually is
MarkUpDown — YAML frontmatter + @@@ design tokens + ::: fenced blocks with NEXT Object Notation keys inside.
One file. One page. Hero, cards, pricing, blog post — declared, not improvised.
```mud
::: hero
title: Built on
accent: Grav
lead: Still flat files. Still yours.
:::
```
The grav-mud-alpha plugin compiles that to HTML. Your theme styles it. No database. No drag-and-drop guilt.
Why not just use Flex Pages / modular / blocks?
Because those are Grav-native power tools — and we want a portable spec that also runs in Code Designer (Monaco + live preview) and exports to static HTML when you don't need PHP on the host.
Same language. Three exits: Grav CMS, static deploy, IDE buffer.
Why Grav specifically?
- Flat files — MUD source is the page file.
- Event pipeline — compile step fits cleanly.
- Theme separation — promo site (
grav-mud-site) vs expose skin (mamber.csson Lone Mamber) without forking the parser. - Andy energy — pitch material that respects "no bloat" as theology.
The honest alpha disclaimer
This is v0.5 pitch fork, not Core. Spec will move. Fence names will stabilize. We're dogfooding on this site and the Lone Mamber PoC before we annoy Trilby Media with a slide deck.
Bottom line: Grav MUD exists because design structure belongs in the content file — readable, diffable, and AI-editable — and Grav is the best flat-file host we know for that bet.
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