Runway Laravel Package

Product Decisions This Supports

• Build vs. buy for CP-managed data: Runway lets you point Statamic's control panel at existing Eloquent models, so non-technical editors can manage rows in your own database tables (products, locations, people, categories) without us building bespoke CRUD screens. This release reinforces that bet — it's an incremental capability release, not a re-architecture, which is the profile of a package we can adopt without a migration project.
• Editorial UX roadmap (v9.7.0): Orderable resources is the headline for product. Curated ordering (featured items, hero lists, ranked content) previously required custom sort columns and hand-rolled UI. We can now offer drag-and-drop ordering in the CP as a standard pattern, which unlocks content-list features we'd otherwise scope as custom work.
• Content modelling decisions: The nested JSON fix in title_field / title_format means resources backed by JSON columns (flexible attribute blobs, multi-locale labels, third-party payloads) can display sensible titles in the CP instead of raw values. This widens which of our existing tables are "editor-friendly enough" to expose without schema changes.
• Performance/ops trade-offs (v9.7.0): The new config flag to disable static cache warming of Runway URIs gives us an explicit lever for sites with large resource sets or heavy warm-up costs. This is a deployment-tuning decision (staging vs. production warm-up, shared hosting constraints) rather than a product decision — but it removes a prior blocker for high-row-count use cases.
• Roadmap sequencing: No breaking changes or deprecations in this release, so it's a low-risk upgrade. It's a "take it now, plan features around it" release rather than a "schedule a migration" release.

When to Consider This Package

Consider adopting when:

• We're on Statamic and already have Eloquent models that hold data editors should manage — i.e., the CMS is the presentation layer but the database is the source of truth.
• We want to avoid duplicating data into Statamic's flat-file content store and then syncing it back.
• Editors need listing, filtering, and CRUD on custom tables from inside the CP, and we don't want to build an admin panel.
• We need curated ordering on those resources (now supported as of 9.7.0) or JSON-backed display fields (fixed in 9.7.0).
• The team is comfortable with the Statamic + Eloquent mental model, and the resource tables are ours to control.

Look elsewhere when:

• We're not using Statamic — this is an addon, not a general Laravel admin-panel solution; Nova, Filament, or Backpack are the direct comparisons.
• The data isn't modelled in Eloquent, or lives in a system we shouldn't expose directly (billing, PII-heavy tables).
• We need complex relational editing UIs, granular per-field permissions, or audit trails — Runway exposes resources; it doesn't replace a full admin platform.
• Very high row counts with heavy caching: the new warm-up opt-out helps, but validate query performance at our scale before committing.
• We need strict version stability guarantees — this is a community addon tracking Statamic majors; pin versions and budget for upgrade work at Statamic major releases.

How to Pitch It (Stakeholders)

For executives: This is a small upgrade to a package that lets our editors manage data we already store, directly inside the CMS, instead of us paying for custom admin screens. The new release adds drag-and-drop ordering for content lists and a config switch to reduce server load on large sites — both capabilities we'd otherwise have to build or work around. No breaking changes, so the upgrade is low-risk and doesn't consume roadmap capacity.

For engineering: Runway v9.7.0 is additive. Two features and one bug fix: a config option to skip static cache warming of Runway URIs (useful for large resource sets or constrained hosting), first-class support for orderable resources (removes the need for a bespoke sort column + custom CP field), and a fix for nested JSON paths in title_field / title_format. No deprecations or migration steps. Recommended action: upgrade, pin the version, and treat orderable resources as the default pattern for curated lists going forward rather than building custom sorting.