Statamic is a modern, easy to use CMS, our tool of choice at Avoca for building websites.
Dashboard
After logging in you’ll be taken to the dashboard (unless you’ve set a different default location). The dashboard contains an overview of recent content and a list of images that might need alt titles.
Finding your content
Explore the left hand navigation.
Collections = where all your content is (pages, blogs etc)
Navigation = where all the menus are
Taxonomies = where any categories, tags or collection specific tags are
Assets = where your images and files are
Content is stored in in what Statamic calls “collections” or groups of related items. All websites will have a pages collection and many sites will have other collections like blogs, events or team members.
You can find the collections in the left hand menu. Choose the collection that contains the content you want to edit and then click on the item you want edit and you can start editing your content.
Tip: use global search to quickly find content
Statamic has excellent built in search. You can access this in the top menu. In Statamic v6 you can also trigger a key command to launch search anywhere in the control panel by clicking ⌘ + K on a Mac or Ctrl + K on a PC
Editing your content and previewing changes
Statamic is easy to use and content is setup with easy to edit fields and options appropriate to your content. Mostly you will either be using the “page builder” to edit or add blocks of content to a page, or use the text editor field that is known as a “bard” field in Statamic.
Both are powerful content tools that are also really easy to learn. Clients often tell us how easy Statamic is to use and one of the key reasons for this is it’s consistency. Once you learn how to do it in one place the rest of the site feels very familiar.
We have separate help articles to help you understand editing both of these kinds of content
Sometimes there will be custom fields for more structured content such as projects or events. These are usually straight forward and we will include help text where appropriate.
Tip: content can have tabs
One key thing to know is that the content editing screen can have tabs. This can be very helpful to keep content organised and “clean” but if you’re not expecting it you might miss them.
Live preview
The best thing about the Statamic editing experience is live preview. See your changes exactly as they will look on the page.
All content that has it’s own page or URL on the site will have a “live preview” button in the top right of the content editing screen as long as it has been published. Clicking live preview will load your content editor on the left with a full visual preview of the page on the right
You can even preview it in mobile by using the “responsive” dropdown and selecting other screensizes.
“Pop out” (button in the top right) will move the preview into it’s own separate window. This can be very helpful if you want to organise the windows to better suit your screen space.
Working with images and assets
One of the key areas Statamic helps content editors is how easy it is to manage images and assets.
Key features:
Easily replace any image without breaking links (whereever it is used on the website)
Set a “focal point” to keep the important part of the image in view no matter what size it is displayed
Folders for easy asset organisation
Working with images in Statamic
User login and security
Statamic version 6 brings two great security features for users. Two factor authentication and the ability to login to your website with passkeys. We definitely recommend setting up two factor authentication for added site security.
Two factor authentication
Passkeys
Just scratching the surface
Statamic is very powerful and we’ve only just scratched the surface here but we wanted to highlight the key concepts that you’ll need to know to get the most out of your Statamic website.
Explore the related knowledge base articles to dive a bit deeper.