Simple Statamic Toolbar Laravel Package

Product Decisions This Supports

• Build vs. buy for in-context editing UX: This package gives Statamic sites a front-end toolbar for quick access to the Control Panel without building one in-house. The v1.3.0 release materially lowers the "build" argument by removing hard dependencies on Alpine.js and Tailwind CSS—two front-end stacks a growing Laravel app may not use, may be migrating away from, or may want to keep out of the public bundle.
• Roadmap sequencing for CMS tooling: If your roadmap includes editor/author experience improvements (fewer clicks from preview to edit, persistent UI preferences, accessible controls), this release covers three of those items at once: accessible expand/collapse, cross-page preference persistence, and template overrides that survive upgrades.
• Front-end stack consolidation decisions: Automatic publishing of the toolbar JS as a separate, cache-busted asset means you can adopt the toolbar without adding a build step, without CDN configuration, and without risking stale-asset bugs after deploys. That directly de-risks decisions to drop Tailwind/Alpine from the public-facing stack.
• Platform upgrade planning (Statamic 5 → 6): CI coverage for both Statamic 5 and 6 is a signal of active maintenance across the current major-version window. This supports treating the package as a safe dependency during a Statamic upgrade rather than a blocker to defer.
• Multi-tenant / subdirectory deployment decisions: The Control Panel link fix for subdirectory-hosted Statamic removes a known class of "works in staging, broken in production" issues, which matters for agencies and teams running multiple sites under path prefixes.
• Use cases it enables: agency-built Statamic sites handing off to non-technical editors; marketing sites where authors jump from live page to edit screen; internal tools where a lightweight admin affordance beats a full custom dashboard.

When to Consider This Package

Consider adopting when:

• You run Statamic 5 or 6 (explicitly supported and CI-tested) on Laravel and want a low-ceremony front-end entry point to the Control Panel.
• Your front end does not use Alpine.js or Tailwind—previously a soft requirement, now a non-issue.
• You want zero build-pipeline coupling: the JS asset publishes and cache-busts itself.
• You need accessible controls (expand/collapse) and preference persistence for editors, not just a static link.
• You deploy under a subdirectory or behind a path prefix, and Control Panel links have been a friction point.
• You customize templates and need published overrides to be respected across package upgrades.

Look elsewhere when:

• You need a full editing/preview experience (inline editing, live preview, draft workflows)—this is a toolbar, not an editor. Evaluate Statamic's native Live Preview or a bespoke solution.
• You require enterprise-grade support SLAs, a vendor contract, or a security review process; this is a single-maintainer open-source addon—assess bus factor and pin versions accordingly.
• Your front end is not Statamic-based, or you are on Statamic 4 or earlier (untested in CI per these notes).
• You already have a custom toolbar or admin overlay with broader functionality; migration cost likely exceeds the benefit.
• You have strict CSP or asset-governance requirements that make auto-published third-party JS a review burden rather than a convenience.

How to Pitch It (Stakeholders)

To executives: This is a small, low-cost Statamic addon that improves the editor experience—authors get a persistent, accessible toolbar to jump from a live page straight into editing. The v1.3.0 release removes two previously required front-end frameworks (Alpine.js and Tailwind CSS), which means we can adopt it without adding weight or dependencies to our public site. It also ships with automated tests across Statamic 5 and 6, so it won't become an upgrade blocker. Risk is low and contained; the main consideration is that it's a single-maintainer open-source package, so we should pin the version and treat it as a convenience layer, not critical infrastructure.

To engineering: Drop-in adoption. Toolbar JS now publishes as its own cache-busted asset—no build-step integration, no Alpine/Tailwind requirement, no stale-asset class of bugs. Published template overrides are respected, so local customizations survive upgrades. Control Panel links are fixed for subdirectory hosting. Mixed-case </body> handling is more robust and no longer mangles embedded scripts. CI runs PHP and JS tests against Statamic 5 and 6. Recommended action: pin to ^1.3, smoke-test the toolbar on a subdirectory-hosted environment if that's our deployment shape, and verify our published template override (if any) renders as expected. This is not a breaking change—no migration work required.