~ 🎄 The December Newsletter 🎄 ~

Hello again and happy holiday season!

Here we are, somehow at the end of another year, a time where I take the opportunity to reflect on all the amazing things that have happened, the time I've been able to spend with the people I care about, and the milestones crossed.

First, this has been the best year for Statamic by every imaginable metric. We’ve had more contributions from the community, more sites launched, more Partners joined, more articles and videos created by the community, more social media chatter, more traffic, more relationships built, more events, live streams, features, enhancements, Github stars, revenue, positive vibes, more everything.

But more than that, this felt like the year where the burden of growing and maintaining product and community — that outpouring of energy and passion and sweat — finally lifted from my shoulders and started to be carried by others in many ways.

Marty Friedel, Joshua Blum, and Sylvester Damgaard spoke at conferences about Statamic. Michael LaRoy launched the From WordPress to Statamic YouTube channel that is now up to 21 videos. Tony Xhepa put out a series of Statamic tutorials on his YouTube channel. We were mentioned multiple times on ShopTalk. There are now multiple podcasts from folks in the Statamic community that regularly talk about what’s going on our world (Code Rush, Campfire Coders). We have some major contributions to the codebase by organizations like TV2 (with over 150 contributions towards high performance and scalability), and individuals like Ryan Mitchell, John Koster, and Jack Sleight. Statamic would not be where it is today without them.

Flat Camp in Italy was incredible. We’ve had Statamic meetups in Amsterdam, London, and Australia.

And then there was the huge influx of new people coming from the WordPress as things got a bit tumultuous over there. We were able to build an great Importer to help those folks out.

And I’m only scratching the surface, knowing I need to keep this short, but I wanted to thank each and everyone of you who open this newsletter and don’t unsubscribe. Every single person who starts a new site build with Statamic. Every tweet, post, toot, reel, short, vid, vlog, and plop. Every thorough issue report. Every pull request. Every star.

From the bottom of my heart — thank you. ❤️

We'll be slowing down here this month and taking a break from December 21st to January 5th to recharge. We have a lot in store for 2025, and we're looking forward to diving back in after the new year.

Merry Christmas and Happy Holidays!

Jack McDade & Team

The Brand New Statamic Dot Com Experience 🚀

Well, we did it. After countless design iterations, a far-too-long-running git branch finally merged, and at least one designer threatening to move to an island in the Caribbean to spend his or her days drinking Hurricanes in the sun...we've launched the new statamic.com. Sure, it looks prettier and more sophisticated while keeping it's quirky roots, and yes the user experience is much more intuitive, but the real magic is in all the new features we've packed into every area of the site.

Check out the blog post to learn about all the new things available to you on statamic.com. We hope you enjoy it.

Official Statamic + Forge Integration

Statamic has been working beautifully with Laravel Forge for a long time. But just recently, Forge added first-party support for creating and deploying new Statamic sites directly through its dashboard.

If you want to skip some steps and jump straight to deploying a live site or just want to take Statamic for a spin, give it a try! You can even select a Starter Kit in the process and create a user right in the setup wizard.

Laravel Forge dashboard showing the Statamic integration

Introducing Field Actions

Field Actions are a collaboration between Jack Sleight and our Core Team, and they introduce the ability to extend a Field in the browser through JavaScript and allows you to perform JS-based tasks on individual fields within a publish form.

This could be useful to manipulate values, fetch data from a third-party service, or perform some kind of logic, transformation, or UI interaction. This is different from our existing Actions which are PHP-based and executed server side.

This feature also improves our overall field UI and gives us a better place to put Fullscreen toggles and other field-specific affordances.

Want to have a deeper look? Head over to our docs on Field Actions.

New Docs Seach

Screenshot showing the input search boxes for Algolia DocSearch and Meilisearch for Statamic's documentation side by side

We recently replaced our documentation site's Algolia's DocSearch with a fully custom Meilisearch implementation that delivers better, more accurate results without sacrificing the user experience.

Now that we control the entire end-to-end search process, we can better respond to feedback and fine-tune the indexing and results algorithms with much greater accuracy, to everyone's exceeding joyful celebrations.

Thanks to John Koster for his work on this! 💜

PHP 8.4 Support

PHP 8.4 was relesed on November 21st, and we're happy to announce that Statamic is fully compatible with it as of v5.41.0.

This is a good time to look at what version of PHP you are running. PHP 8.0 is no longer maintained by the PHP Foundation. Always go for the newest version if you can.

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