Statamic
Laravel
Laravel is the company behind the Laravel PHP framework and products like Laravel Cloud and Forge. Their marketing site runs on Statamic, built by their own engineering team.
This project was a short consulting engagement focused on the editing experience for Laravel's marketing team.
Laravel's marketing engineering team had just started moving their marketing site to Statamic, and there was still a lot to do. Their devs were also pretty busy, and the people writing content every day were marketers, but operating in a dev capacity... creating their new landing pages by making new static ones.
Commit, push, PR, await approval, merge, deploy - all this had to happen instead of just pushing "Publish" from the CMS.
So, Aaron Francis reached out and asked if I could spend a week or two helping out to remove this obvious bottleneck. They knew what needed to change, but they also needed a strategic approach that could enable them to do this across the whole site, not just these new one-off landing pages.
Start With the Code
Checking the Wishlist Against Reality
The marketing team came with a wishlist. Before writing any code, I connected with as many people on the team as I could, so I could better understand their use cases, and their desired ideal state for publishing, and went through it item by item against the actual codebase.
Some of what was on the list already existed, so part of the answer was simply education: showing the team how to use what they already had. Other items were real gaps... and a couple of them turned out to be bigger than they looked on paper.
At first, we created a page builder for the landing pages, which consisted of a limited set of custom blocks based on the React components they already had in their front end template.
As we progressed, it was clear that we needed this system for other standard pages and blog posts. Up until then, anyone writing a blog post was working with a much smaller set of tools, so we had to make things more universally available.
The Work
Templates the Team Could Use Right Away
From there the work moved quickly. I brought the custom blocks to more of the site, made reusable content like FAQs easier to pick and choose from, and smoothed out the differences between page templates so editors didn't have to remember which one did what.
In addition, we managed to make a bunch of content models that were until then only editable in a Filament panel, editable in Statamic instead. Sometimes this involved actually turning the content into Statamic collections, and other times using Runway to connect the models to the control panel.
By the end of the engagement, nearly everything on the original list was done, along with a good deal that wasn't on it.
For me, this was an ideal engagement - the client had a real gap to fill, and needed some help finding the right way to get there, and then together we could dramatically move the needle for them and get those gaps filled.