Statamic Bard Text Align Laravel Package

Product Decisions This Supports

• Editorial autonomy vs. engineering toil: Enables content teams to center headlines, align pull quotes, and right-align captions without filing layout tickets — a direct lever for reducing "small CMS change" requests to engineering.
• Build vs. buy for Bard extensions: A native-feeling text-align control in the Bard toolbar would otherwise require a custom Vue/ProseMirror button (roughly 1–2 dev days plus ongoing ownership). This package is the "buy" option in that trade-off.
• Design-system scope: Forces an explicit decision about how much typographic control to expose. Alignment can be limited to approved utility classes (e.g., u-text-center) versus freeform inline styles — a governance choice, not just a feature toggle.
• Page-builder deferral: Closes a common "we can't even center a heading" gap cheaply, letting you postpone investment in heavier block-based layout tooling while still shipping marketing pages.
• CMS standardization: If Bard is your primary editorial surface, alignment is table-stakes formatting that WordPress and most SaaS CMSs ship by default; this narrows the competitive gap.
• Use cases: blog and marketing pages, hero sections, captions and legal notices, email-style content, and any flat-file content where authors want light visual hierarchy without custom sets.

When to Consider This Package

Consider it when:

• You're on Statamic 4/5+ and Bard is a primary fieldtype in active templates.
• Editors have explicitly requested alignment, or you're seeing a recurring pattern of layout-change requests.
• You want alignment persisted as structured Bard/ProseMirror data rather than raw HTML pasted into fields.
• Speed and cost matter more than vendor guarantees — the addon is small enough to audit in an afternoon.
• Your team already accepts Composer-installed community addons with pinned versions.

Look elsewhere when:

• You need responsive or per-breakpoint alignment, grid composition, or column control — use Bard Sets or a page builder instead.
• Alignment must map strictly to your design tokens; a bespoke button may be required regardless.
• Procurement or security review requires maintainer health signals. With zero stars and zero dependents, this is effectively a single-maintainer package: no community validation, no upgrade-lag data, no downstream bug reports.
• You aren't on Statamic Bard (headless CMS, Markdown fields, or a different editor).

How to Pitch It (Stakeholders)

Executives: "A small, low-cost addon that gives editors basic text alignment inside our CMS, cutting routine layout requests to engineering. Risk is contained — it's a formatting control, not a data model or integration change — and it can be removed with a config rollback."

Engineering: "It extends the Bard toolbar with alignment marks and stores them in the existing ProseMirror JSON, so there's no migration or new infrastructure: one composer require, a toolbar config edit, and a frontend class mapping. Caveat: the package has no stars, no dependents, and no visible maintenance signal, so pin the version, smoke-test against our Statamic upgrade path, and be prepared to fork or vendor it. The fallback is a ~1–2 day custom Bard button with the same surface area and more control."

Design: "Alignment is opt-in per field. We can expose only the options our typography system supports, keeping editorial output inside brand guidelines rather than opening up arbitrary styling."