Bard (Field Type)

Bard is a field type in Statamic designed for rich, structured long-form content. It combines a prose editor (for paragraphs, headings, lists, inline formatting) with the ability to insert custom "sets" — essentially blocks of structured content built from other field types. A single Bard field might contain a few paragraphs, then an image with a caption and alt text, then a pull quote, then more prose, all stored as structured data rather than a blob of HTML.

Under the hood, Bard stores content in a JSON format based on ProseMirror, which is the same editor library used by a number of other modern editors. This means the content is portable and queryable — you can extract just the image blocks, or just the headings, if you need to.

The WordPress equivalent that most people reach for is Gutenberg, the block editor introduced in WordPress 5.0. Like Bard, Gutenberg lets editors build pages from a mix of prose and structured blocks. The key difference is that Bard is a field type within Statamic’s broader field system — it coexists with other field types in a Blueprint and is just one tool among many. Gutenberg, by contrast, is WordPress’s primary editing paradigm and affects the entire post editing experience.

You can also use Bard more simply, just as a rich text editor with no custom sets at all, if you just need formatted prose. In that case, it behaves similarly to a WYSIWYG field in any other CMS.

When migrating from WordPress, Bard is often where post content ends up. Long-form content that was stored as WordPress post_content (HTML in the database) gets mapped into a Bard field, either as plain prose or with the structure rebuilt using Bard sets. How much effort this takes depends on how cleanly structured the original WordPress content was. Classic Editor content migrates more easily than complex Gutenberg block structures, which require more careful mapping.