Filament Knowledge Base Laravel Package

Product Decisions This Supports

• Launching private or gated knowledge bases. This release makes article assets work on a private disk: thumbnails and images resolve through the core's ArticleAssets::url(), which returns a signed URL for articles that aren't public. That turns "internal-only KB with images and attachments" from a security liability into a shippable feature.
• Roadmap: customer portals, internal wikis, compliance-sensitive document repositories. Any roadmap item where readers are authenticated and content must not leak via guessable public URLs is now supportable without custom code.
• Build vs. buy: buy/consume. Signed-URL plumbing, editor attachment handling, and asset reconciliation are commodity work with subtle failure modes (expired URLs, orphaned images). Consuming this package avoids a bespoke asset layer.
• Reduced infrastructure ask. storage:link is only needed against older core versions; combined with private-disk defaults, this removes a recurring ops/setup step and a common source of "images broken in staging" tickets.
• Content-integrity decisions. Deleted images are omitted from rendered articles rather than shown as broken assets, and images are now matched by asset uuid as well as disk path — which means assets get stable IDs on save. That underpins future features like asset reuse, replacement-in-place, and usage reporting.
• Filament version strategy. This is a backport of #64 to Filament 3, signalling the mainline is moving to Filament 4. Plan the admin-panel upgrade as a tracked dependency item rather than discovering it during a feature push.

When to Consider This Package

Consider it when all of the following hold:

• You are building on jeffersongoncalves/laravel-knowledge-base ^2.0 — this is a companion package, not a standalone asset manager.
• Your admin surface is Filament 3 (this release explicitly targets it).
• You need private-disk assets: signed URLs for non-public articles, thumbnails, and editor (Trix) attachments that survive URL expiry and form reloads.
• You want editor-grade asset handling — attachments stored with private visibility, URLs refreshed on form load including Trix's own attachment payload, and deleted images gracefully dropped from rendered content.
• You are willing to accept a narrow, core-coupled surface area in exchange for not maintaining signed-URL logic yourself.

Look elsewhere (or defer) when:

• You are not using laravel-knowledge-base ^2.0, or you are on a core version that still links directly to the public disk — you would carry the storage:link requirement and lose most of the value here.
• You need a full DAM/CDN pipeline — transformations, responsive variants, video, rights metadata, bulk ingestion. This is an article-asset integration, not a media platform.
• You are mid-migration to Filament 4 — adopt the mainline release instead of the backport to avoid doing this twice.
• Your security model requires multi-tenant isolation, per-asset ACLs, or audit trails on asset access — those belong in the core or your own layer, not here.
• You need public, cacheable, CDN-served imagery as the primary path; signed URLs trade edge-cacheability for access control.

How to Pitch It (Stakeholders)

For executives: This is a small, low-risk patch that closes a real security gap — private knowledge-base articles no longer expose images and attachments through public disk URLs. It makes "internal-only documentation with visuals" a feature we can ship and defend in a security review, and it removes a setup dependency (storage:link) from our deployment checklist. Cost is a version bump; risk is contained because the change is a backport of an already-shipped fix.

For engineering: Patch release, no breaking changes. Assets now resolve via ArticleAssets::url(), so private articles yield signed URLs; the Guest and User panels resolve content before render, emitting each asset's current URL and omitting deleted images. Editor attachments default to private, and asset URLs — including Trix's attachment data — refresh on form load, so expired stored URLs self-heal. Assets are also identified by uuid when the URL is one the core serves, not just by disk path, so they acquire an asset ID on save. Constraint to note: this is the Filament 3 backport of #64, so treat Filament 4 as a planned upgrade with its own ticket rather than an incidental bump.