Introduction

Lynx is a content management system built on Laravel. Use it on its own, as a new Laravel app whose only job is the site, or add it to a Laravel application you already have. It gives your app a tree of pages, fields you define without writing migrations, an admin where editors work, and built-in support for sites in several languages.

A little Laravel is enough to start: if you have written a route and a Blade view, you know most of what you need. Lynx adds a few ideas of its own, which the rest of this guide introduces one at a time.

TIP

To see a finished site first, open the live demo: the website of an invented software company, in English and Portuguese. Its code is a starter you can install in about five minutes, admin included: LynxCMS/lynx-corporate-starter.

NOTE

Lynx is in active development and has not reached 1.0. Its APIs may still change between releases, and the roadmap lists what is planned.

Why Lynx?

Built with Laravel alone, a content site needs a table, a migration and a model for each kind of content, an editing screen for each one, and more tables when a second language arrives. Lynx gives you all of that from a description of your content:

• Content types without migrations. You describe a template (say, post) and its fields (title, summary, body) in the admin, in PHP or in YAML. Lynx creates the tables and gives you an editing screen for it.
• Languages from the start. Adding Portuguese to a running site takes one step, with no migration and no deploy. Every translatable field falls back to another language when a translation is missing, and each page gets a translated URL such as /pt/blogue/ola-mundo.
• Pages in a tree. Pages have parents and children, like folders, so URLs, menus, breadcrumbs and permissions follow the structure editors see.
• One way to change content. Saving, moving and translating pages, or adding a field, are actions. The admin, your code, Artisan commands, AI tools and the built-in AI agent all run the same actions, so validation, permissions and the activity log always apply.

How Lynx fits into your app

Lynx is a set of Composer packages that live inside a Laravel app, either a new one made for the site or one you already have. After installing it:

• Your routes still come first. Lynx registers one catch-all route that serves the pages of the tree for any URL your app does not handle.
• Pages render with Blade. A page that uses the post template renders resources/views/templates/post.blade.php, which receives the page as $page.
• You can read content anywhere in your code: in a controller, a command or a queued job, lynx()->pages->find('template=post, limit=10') returns pages.
• Your app keeps its own database tables, users, queues and deployment. Lynx adds tables that start with lynx_.

The admin

The lynxcms/admin package gives editors a place to work that needs no technical knowledge. They get:

• the site as a tree of pages they can open, drag to reorder and move;
• a page editor with the fields laid out the way you arranged them, in plain labels, with a tab per language;
• drafts they can preview before publishing, and publishing on a schedule;
• a history of every save, which they can compare and restore;
• a trash to recover from mistakes.

Developer details, such as template names and field types, are shown only to superusers (the accounts allowed to do everything), and a site with one language never mentions translations.

Running without the admin

The admin is optional. With only lynxcms/core, you define templates and fields in PHP or in YAML files, write content from code, Tinker (php artisan tinker), seeders (Laravel classes that fill the database), imports or content packages, and let AI tools such as Claude work with the site through the MCP server. Your app can build its own editing screens on the same API, and every rule, such as permissions and validation, still applies, because it lives in the actions, not in the admin.

Livewire

Livewire is a Laravel library for interactive parts of a page, such as a form that checks its fields as you type, written in PHP instead of JavaScript. Pages render with Blade, so a template can use any Livewire component of your app, such as a newsletter form or a search filter. With a component field, editors place components on pages themselves and fill in their settings. See Views.

The admin is built with Livewire 4 too, so you can add screens of your own to it the same way you build the rest of your app (Extending the Admin).

The packages

Only lynxcms/core is required. Add the others when a site needs them; each one has its own page in this guide.

Package	What it adds
lynxcms/core	Languages, fields, templates, pages, selectors, actions, routing and Blade helpers.
lynxcms/admin	The admin at /lynx: page tree, page editor, fields, templates, languages, roles and users.
lynxcms/menus	Menus that editors build, and the <x-lynx-menu> component.
lynxcms/media	Image and file fields, with resizing and focus points.
lynxcms/forms	Forms defined in PHP or built in the admin, with an inbox for submissions.
lynxcms/seo	Titles, descriptions, social cards and structured data for each page.
lynxcms/sitemap	An XML sitemap with every language.
lynxcms/cache	A page cache that stores pages for guests and sends them again without rendering, or without PHP at all with web server rules.
lynxcms/page-password	Pages that ask visitors for a password.
lynxcms/static-site	Exports the site as static files.
lynxcms/mcp	An MCP server, so AI tools such as Claude can work with the site.
lynxcms/ai	A built-in AI agent and machine translation.
lynxcms/contracts	Interfaces the packages share. You do not install it yourself.

Where to go next

• Installation adds Lynx to a new or existing Laravel app.
• Your First Site builds a small blog in two languages, step by step.
• Core Concepts explains pages, templates, fields, languages and actions in more depth.