A Laravel blog engine like no other

Meet the Laravel blog engine that integrates with your website using a straightforward API. Smooth, simple, and tasty content integration — that’s Butter.

Posted on October 22, 2024

Intuitive admin interface

So easy to use. So easy to customize. You’re going to love the blog you build with ButterCMS.

Handy integration with Laravel

Our Laravel blog engine has a simple content API and drop-in SDKs that make the magic happen in minutes, not hours.

A truly zero-maintenance solution

With ButterCMS, you’ll never worry about security upgrades, hosting, or performance again.

You've got better things to do than build another blog

Drop our Laravel blog engine into your app, and get back to more interesting problems.

ButterCMS is an API-based blog engine that integrates seamlessly with new and existing Laravel apps. It's great for SEO, and provides a clean and modern user interface that your marketing team will love. You can deploy ButterCMS in minutes using our Laravel API client.

That leaves plenty of time for you and your marketing team to do what you do best: create killer apps with killer content.

Play video

See how Butter’s API enables you to launch a flexible blog with amazing SEO using your existing tech stack.

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Best blog engine on the market

headshot of Hampton Catl

After shopping the market, it was clear that ButterCMS was the perfect choice. It allows our developers to build powerful components and makes it easy for our marketing team to drive a better customer experience. Hampton Catlin Creator of Sass and Haml

Deploy our Laravel Starter in 30 Seconds!

Or follow the below commands to clone a copy of the repo from github, install dependencies, set your free Butter token, and run your local server on localhost:8000/.

$ git clone https://github.com/ButterCMS/laravel-starter-buttercms
$ cd laravel-starter-buttercms
$ composer install
$ echo 'LARAVEL_APP_BUTTER_CMS_API_KEY=your_free_api_token_here' >> .env
$ php artisan serve

Built to make content marketing easy

ButterCMS is the best Laravel blog engine for a simple reason: Laravel developers can build solutions that marketing people love. Our API allows your content gurus to quickly spin up high-converting blog templates, sidebars, related content features, and more, all using simple drag-and-drop functionality.

  • Use main domain (improves SEO)
  • Friendly admin interface
  • Upload images, video, and other media
  • Edit URL slugs and meta tags
  • Tags and categories
  • Author profiles
  • RSS/Atom feeds
  • Search
  • Webhooks
  • And more...

The simplest Laravel blog engine you'll find

Our simple setup saves you time and money. Take us for a spin to see for yourself!

headshot of LUKE GARDNER

It's the epitome of plug-and-play simplicity for content creators. It does exactly what I need it to. LUKE GARDNER, CONTENT SPECIALIST, PRINTAVO

Fast integration with any Laravel app

Our mission was to make it easy to integrate Butter with your existing Laravel app in minutes. It’s so simple! To demonstrate, here’s a mini tutorial to give you a feel for the process of adding Butter to your Laravel app.

Of course, you can also use our Pages and Collections to do advanced content modeling. For a full integration guide, check out our Official Guide for the ButterCMS Laravel API client.

Play video

See how easily you can integrate the ButterCMS Pages API with your Laravel app.

Seamless Laravel components

Empower your marketing team to create a customized blog engine that aligns perfectly with your Laravel components.

Components are the essential building blocks of any Laravel app, and ButterCMS handles them with ease.

Our drag and drop interface makes it simple to structure your content to match existing Laravel components and to create new reusable components whenever you need them.

The best Laravel blog engine for SEO

ButterCMS gives you absolute control over on-page SEO ranking factors. Key SEO variables are built into our default post template, giving your marketing team direct access to configure all of these settings, and more.

  • Page title
  • Post tags and categories
  • META description
  • URL slug
  • Featured image / Open Graph image
  • Image ALT tags
  • Link anchor text

ButterCMS saves you development time

Most customers get our Laravel blog engine up and running in less than an hour. Try it yourself!

headshot of DILLON BURNS

Simple as can be, with powerful features and great customer support. DILLON BURNS, FRONT END DEVELOPER, KEYME

How to integrate ButterCMS into your Laravel application

Integrating the Butter blog engine into your Laravel app is dead simple. Here's a mini tutorial to get a feel for setting up your blog home and blog post pages.

For a full integration guide, check out our Official Laravel Guide

To display posts we create a simple /blog route in our app and fetch blog posts from the Butter API. See our API reference for additional options such as filtering by category or author. The response also includes some metadata we'll use for pagination.

routes/web.php:

Route::get('/blog', 'BlogController@listAllPosts');
Route::get('/blog/p/{page}', 'BlogController@listAllPosts');

app/Http/Controllers/BlogController.php:

namespace App\Http\Controllers;

use Illuminate\Routing\Controller as BaseController;
use ButterCMS\ButterCMS;

class BlogController extends BaseController {

  private static $apiToken = 'your_api_token';
  private $client;

  public function __construct() {
    $this->client = new ButterCMS(BlogController::$apiToken);
  }

  public function listAllPosts(int $page = 1) {
    $response = $this->client->fetchPosts([ 
      'page' => $page,
      'page_size' => 10
    ]);
    return view('posts', [
      'posts' => $response->getPosts(),
      'nextPage' => $response->getMeta()['next_page'],
      'previousPage' => $response->getMeta()['previous_page']
    ]);
  }
}

Next we'll create a simple view at resources/views/posts.blade.php that displays our posts and pagination links:

@extends('master')

@section('pageTitle', 'Blog')

@section('content')
  <h2>Blog</h2>

  @foreach ($posts as $post)
    <a href="/blog/{{urlencode($post->getSlug())}}">{{$post->getTitle()}}</a> 
    by 
    <a href="/author/{{urlencode($post->getAuthor()->getSlug())}}">
      {{$post->getAuthor()->getFirstName()}} {{$post->getAuthor()->getLastName()}}
    </a>
    <br>
  @endforeach

  @if (!is_null($previousPage))
    <a href="/blog/p/{{$previousPage}}">Prev</a>
  @endif
  @if (!is_null($nextPage))
    <a href="/blog/p/{{$nextPage}}">Next</a>
  @endif
@stop

We'll also create an additional route and controller method for displaying individual posts:

Route::get('/blog/{slug}', 'BlogController@showPost')

public function showPost(string $slug) {
  $response = $this->client->fetchPost($slug);
  $post = $response->getPost();
  return view('post', [
    'post' => $post,
    'published' => date('j/n/Y', strtotime($post->getPublished())),
  ]);
}

The view for displaying a full post includes information such as author, publish date, and categories. See a full list of available post properties in our API reference. We use the @section Laravel helper for setting the HTML title and meta description in the <head> tag of the page.

@extends('master')

@section('pageTitle', $post->getSeoTitle())
@section('metaDescription', $post->getMetaDescription())

@section('content')

  <!-- Post title -->
  <h2>{{$post->getTitle()}}</h2>

  <!-- Publish date -->
  Published {{$published}} 

  @if (count($post->getCategories()) > 0)  
    in
  @endif

  <!-- Post categories -->
  @foreach ($post->getCategories() as $category)
    <a href="/category/{{urlencode($category->getSlug())}}">{{$category->getName()}}</a>
  @endforeach

  <br />

  <!-- Post author -->
  <a href="/author/{{urlencode($post->getAuthor()->getSlug())}}">
    {{$post->getAuthor()->getFirstName()}} {{$post->getAuthor()->getLastName()}}
  </a>

  <br />

  <div>
    {!! $post->getBody() !!}
  </div>
@stop

That's it! The blog posts created in your Butter dashboard will immediately show up in your app.

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