- What is themsaid/wink used for in a Laravel application?
- Wink is a Laravel package for quickly building a simple blog or publishing platform with a clean admin panel. It manages posts, pages, tags, and media, lets you write in Markdown, and exposes content through Eloquent models such as Wink\Post, Wink\Page, and Wink\Tag. It is not a standalone application; it registers routes, views, migrations, and config into a host Laravel app under a /wink route prefix.
- How do I install Wink in a Laravel app?
- Install it with Composer, publish its assets and config with vendor:publish, and run php artisan migrate to create the wink_-prefixed tables. Then configure the Wink auth guard and storage disk in config/wink.php. A working admin panel is typically available in under a day of effort, but the public-facing site is still your responsibility.
- Does Wink include a public-facing blog frontend?
- No. Wink ships an admin SPA and content models, but it does not provide public routes, templates, sitemaps, RSS feeds, or SEO tags. You build the read side yourself with your own controllers, Blade or Inertia views, caching layer, and metadata. Budget the frontend as the actual project and treat Wink as a small dependency inside it.
- Which Laravel versions does Wink support?
- Wink fits Laravel 8 through 10 era applications, and you should validate package boot before committing to Laravel 11 or 12. The package has been in caretaker status with a last release in May 2023, so every Laravel major upgrade is a compatibility risk. Pin both the Wink version and Laravel version in composer.json and run CI against that pinned pair.
- How does authentication work in the Wink admin panel?
- Wink uses a parallel auth guard with users defined in config or a dedicated table. It does not provide SSO or automatically reuse host-app users and roles without custom wrapping. Decide early whether to keep config-driven Wink users or wrap the guard to defer to your application users, because it touches every admin route.
- Can I use Wink with my existing Laravel user model?
- Not out of the box. Wink's admin authentication is a separate guard, so reusing your existing users or roles requires custom wrapping. You can keep the config-driven Wink users for simplicity or adapt the guard to delegate to your application's auth system. Plan this before building admin customizations.
- Is Wink suitable for multi-author editorial workflows or localization?
- Wink is a poor fit for editorial workflows, approvals, localization, multi-tenancy, or content types that are not documents. Its content model is a single Markdown body with minimal structure, with no block editor, revision history surface, or approval states. It works best for a genuinely blog-shaped site with posts, pages, tags, and a small author set.
- How do I customize Wink's Markdown content and media storage?
- Content is stored in a Markdown body column and surfaced as Eloquent models, so render it in your own frontend with the Markdown parser you choose. Media goes to a configured disk via config/wink.php, with no transformation or CDN pipeline out of the box; add derivatives yourself if your design needs them. Customizing the admin UI pulls you into its Vue 2 toolchain, which is past end-of-life.
- What are the maintenance risks of using Wink in production?
- Maintenance signal is weak: last release was May 2023 and the package has been in caretaker status since. The admin UI is Vue 2, compiled assets ship in the package, and every Laravel major upgrade becomes a bet on whether it still boots. Budget a named owner who can read and patch the source, plus an internal fork or mirror for security and framework-compatibility fixes.
- What alternatives to Wink should I consider for a Laravel blog or CMS?
- Evaluate a hosted CMS, Statamic, or a Filament-based admin built over your own Eloquent models, and compare total cost of ownership against Wink. Wink is strongest when the host app already runs Laravel, the content model is blog-shaped, and you accept building the public frontend yourself. If you need editorial workflow, localization, or long-term vendor support, a maintained alternative is usually lower risk.