I spent two months last year trying to build a content-management system on top of FilamentPHP. I had reasons. Filament was the most polished thing in the Laravel ecosystem. Every Laravel dev I respected was using it. I'd already shipped two admin panels with it for client work and they came together fast.
The third project was different — a marketing site with a blog, pages, a menu, redirects, SEO meta, scheduled posts, and a real public-facing theme. I figured: same stack, same DSL, same speed. I was wrong, and the lesson took me longer to learn than I'd like to admit.
This is what I learned, what I'd do differently, and why I eventually built something else.
TL;DR: Filament is excellent at being Filament — a builder DSL for admin panels around your own data model. It's not a CMS, and trying to use it as a CMS by scaffolding PostResource, PageResource, MediaResource, etc., is a quietly expensive way to ship a website. Pick Filament when the data model is yours to design. Pick a CMS when the data model is "post, page, media, menu, SEO, redirect" — that problem has been solved for 20 years and you shouldn't rebuild it.
What I Built On Filament
