Statamic Models

[NoelDeMartin]

Hi there!

Some weeks ago I migrated my personal website to Statamic, and I'm super happy with the way it's going :D. I was previously using plain Laravel with Nova, so I was worried that using a CMS would feel limiting in some way. But that couldn't be further from the truth, I've been very surprised with the balance between flexibility and convenience. It's easy to create and manage content in the control panel, but it's always possible to access the full power of Laravel under the hood. Statamic really embodies the Laravel ethos and kicks it up a notch with content management. I love it!

One of the things I did during the migration was convert Laravel Models to Statamic Collections, and I came up with something that maybe others will find useful, so I wanted to share it.

Basically, when I was using plain old models, I had a bunch of custom accessors derived from data. For example, I had a Post model with a text_html attribute with the post content, and a derived summary_html attribute with a summary to show in the blog index:

class Post extends Model {
	
    public function getSummaryHtmlAttribute() {
        $summary = substr($this->text_html, 0, strpos($this->text_html, '<h2'));

        $summary = preg_replace('/<a(\s|>)[^>]*>(.*?)<\/a>/', '$2', $summary);
        $summary = preg_replace('/<img[^>]*>/', '', $summary);

        return $summary;
    }

}

When I migrated to Statamic collections, I found a similar solution with Computed Values. But given that I had a bunch of these, I wasn't too happy with the ergonomics of defining them with a Facade. Then I thought, wouldn't it be awesome to have Statamic Models with methods to declare computed properties, the same way I was doing it with Laravel models? So that's what I did!

TLDR, this is what it looks like in practice:

class Post extends StatamicModel {

    public function summary(): string {
        $summary = substr($this->content, 0, strpos($this->content, '<h2') ?: 0);
        $summary = preg_replace('/<a(\s|>)[^>]*>(.*?)<\/a>/', '$2', $summary) ?: '';
        $summary = preg_replace('/<img[^>]*>/', '', $summary) ?: '';

        return $summary;
    }

}

Which is, indeed, almost the same code I had before :D. Given that I'm only using these for computed values (for now), I didn't bother defining it like getSummaryValue or something. But that would certainly be better if I end up using this idea for more functionality.

So, what do you think? Do you like it? :). I thought about opening a PR to contribute this to Statamic's core, but honestly I'm not sure there'll be any interest so I decided to just write this instead 😅. Let me know if you think this could make it to the core, though!

If you're curious about the implementation, it's very simple. Check out the StatamicModel class and how they are loaded.

[edalzell]

You could patch in my PR to set a model per collection: #11203. Then you can use collection specific methods

[NoelDeMartin]

That's cool, I started watching the PR and if it gets merged I may open a follow up :).