So as it turns out, the guy who made Statamic has decided to publicize his extremely unfortunate views that controlling womens’ bodies is the most important thing to him in this election, over keeping families together, over immigrant lives, over Black lives, over queer lives.
He’s written—and I’m not linking the post here because I believe in deoxygenating these sort of views when possible—that he fears being canceled or losing support for his business Statamic over expressing his bigoted and narrow-minded views. Oh gosh, oh no. I don’t necessarily believe in “canceling” so much as I believe in folks’ ability to hold others accountable for the stupid shit they blog, with their money or any other resources — If that’s canceling, let’s rumble.
TL;DR? Statamic is run by a jerk and I’d love to recommend y’all some alternatives in case you’re using it or considering it and want to course-correct.
Path of Least Resistance
If you’re looking for another PHP CMS with a configurable UI, your best bets are gonna be either Kirby or Craft:
Kirby CMS
Kirby is super well-featured and well-liked, but let me quickly list off its similarities to Statamic if you’re looking for feature parity.
- ✅ Powered by PHP
- ✅ Works as both a full CMS or just a headless solution.
- ✅ Self-hosting option
- ✅ Configurable UI
- ✅ Version controllable
- ✅ Drafting and previews
- ✅ Custom fields and content modeling
Kirby also has a vibrant community, flat-file structure, a really sick customizable Vue UI kit, Markdown support, internationalization support, and it lets you integrate additional data sources.
Additionally, Bastian Allgeier, the founder of Kirby, has written on more than one occasion about the climate crisis and his personal efforts to fight it, which I mention because Statamic Guy has decided climate change is not of interest to him when compared to controlling women.
Craft CMS
Craft is a hugely popular tool, and loved by all kinds of agencies, small businesses, and professionals. Same deal here, let’s talk about some similarities to Statamic and some differences.
- ✅ Powered by PHP
- ✅ Works as both a full CMS or just a headless solution.
- ✅ Tons of content types and custom field features
- ✅ Configurable Dashboard
Craft also has localization support out of the box, some really good user management tools, and even a built-in image editor tool that allows you to set focal points and cropping, for better image rendering in different contexts. They also have an entire eCommerce solution that works side-by-side with their content manager so your online selling team only has to work with one platform.
It’s worth also mentioning that the Craft team sponsors diversity scholarships and conferences — that prioritization of diverse communities is something missing from Statamic, whose founder believes Black lives and the lives of queer folks and non-men are worth less than his right to legislate women’s bodies.
Additional Alternatives
I’ve had excellent experiences with a lot of these headless CMS tools. The Jamstack conf team has put together this very good list of headless CMS options, and I have my own personal recommendations:
Netlify CMS
It’s a single flat file you add to your site that manages flat files in Git with a configurable UI, it’s free, it’s open source, it’s powered by Netlify. Its power lies in its simplicity. I’ve used this tool for a couple different projects with small businesses and otherwise, and it really serves a surprising amount of needs. The community is great, too, and they’ve written guides for getting you started with most front-end solutions. It’s purely headless but a great solution for rapidly converting static projects to dynamic content.
Contentful
This blog post was written with Contentful — it’s one of my favorite headless CMS solutions. Contentful is language/framework agnostic, though they provide a bunch of tooling for common integrations. You edit content and content-modeling in your configurable dashboard and it is served through a very flexible RESTful API. They also do a bunch of behind-the-scenes asset/CDN/caching optimization. Big recommend for small teams.
Questions or Concerns?
If you’re a DJT supporter or you still think this is a matter of regular old red-v-blue politics, I would love to hear your opinion, feel free to email me at lmfao@henry.codes. If you have other corrections or questions for this post, get at me on Twitter, I’m most responsive on there.
Updates
- Craft CMS is based on Yii, not Laravel as previously mentioned. H/T Iain Bean for the correction.