Laravel

Laravel is an open-source PHP web application framework created by Taylor Otwell in 2011. It provides a structured way to build web applications in PHP, with conventions for routing, database access, authentication, queuing, caching, and a lot more. Statamic is built entirely on Laravel, which means every Statamic site is also a Laravel application — you get access to the full framework, not just the CMS layer.

That relationship matters more than it might seem. When you need something Statamic doesn’t handle natively — a custom form handler, an integration with a third-party API, a complex data transformation — you’re not stuck patching around the CMS. You write Laravel code, which is well-documented, widely understood, and backed by a large ecosystem of packages.

For WordPress developers, the analogy isn’t perfect, but think of Laravel as filling some of the same roles that WordPress’s plugin infrastructure does, except it’s a proper application framework rather than a hook system bolted onto a CMS. WordPress’s functions.php lets you customize the platform, but you’re always working within WordPress’s conventions. In a Statamic/Laravel site, you’re working within a framework built for general web development, with the CMS layered on top.

Practically speaking, most content editors will never think about Laravel at all. The control panel handles day-to-day work, and Laravel stays in the background. But for developers doing the migration, it’s useful to know that any PHP developer familiar with Laravel can contribute to a Statamic project without learning a lot of Statamic-specific internals first.

Laravel also brings in Eloquent (its ORM), Artisan (its command-line tool), Blade (its templating engine), and the Composer package ecosystem — all of which have their own glossary entries and all of which you’ll encounter in a Statamic project. See also: Artisan (CLI), Blade (Templating), Eloquent.