Help Us Improve Filament’s Docs & Education in v4
Hey everyone! As we gear up for Filament v4, one of our big priorities is rewriting the documentation to make it clearer, more complete, and easier to navigate. At the same time, we’re planning a wider education strategy, probably including official video courses.
But we need your help! If you've learned Filament - whether recently or way back in v1 - what were the biggest pain points?
🔸 What parts of the docs confused you or felt incomplete?
🔸 What concepts took you the longest to understand?
🔸 What would have helped you get productive with Filament faster?
One thing we are for sure improving is the accessibility of the "utility injection" parameters you have available in each configuration function. In v4 it will be clear exactly which can be injected in each function.
Some topics might not fit perfectly in the docs, but they could be covered in video examples - so if you’ve ever thought, "I wish there was a video demonstrating a use case for X!", let us know!
We want to make sure Filament v4 is as accessible as possible, whether you're building your first admin panel or scaling a complex multi-panel app. Your feedback will directly shape the next generation of learning resources.
Drop your thoughts in the comments! We’re listening.
24 Replies
I'm quite new at using Filament (two or three weeks ago) and the documentation is really relevant and helpful, it's easy to understand and quite complete, maybe add some videos would be great since Filament is very visual and understandable in videos we can find.
In any case thank you for your work, it has revolutionized my way of working with php
My biggest problem when I started was the documentation related to customizations. When I wanted to create custom components or custom views, I always ran into quite a few problems with this since the documentation in that sense was scarce.
This was largely fixed in v3 thanks to the "Adding to a Livewire component" sections, but it's still pretty sparse, and it could still be developed a little more in that regard.
In general I see the rest very well.
Just interested - for custom components did the Laracasts videos help you (if you watched them)? I do want to incorporate this content into text format.
No, I didn't know about those videos.
Ah ok! They are embedded in the documentation. Take a look at "Custom fields" for example.
Thanks! Good to know.
I struggled with the ubiquitous naming of Actions. In the beginning, determining whether I was in the right documentation place, dependent on which type of 'Action' I was trying to work with.
Also, I felt some more images would have helped.
In v4 there is only one type of Action :)
Having said that, I have managed to utilise a great deal of it in less than 5 months....so from my view the documentation is effective and doesn't need a complete overhaul.
It may be just personal preference but I would love to have more images overall and yea videos.
You already mentioned a complete overhaul of the "test" docs, which are very welcomed, those were too scattered across the current docs imho. Probably way too much off-base but showing an interactable example of components and features etc. could be a delight. Like showing the actual rendered component (like flux ui) with the current option from the docs (if that makes sense) 😋
You already mentioned a complete overhaul of the "test" docs, which are very welcomed, those were too scattered across the current docs imho. Probably way too much off-base but showing an interactable example of components and features etc. could be a delight. Like showing the actual rendered component (like flux ui) with the current option from the docs (if that makes sense) 😋
Yeah I highly doubt we will do interactive examples (we would need to move away from Astro for our docs, which provides us with a ton of extra functionality), but I am looking at adding more screenshots.
I hope new docs, add example with screenshots more and more.
i had the same issue
This is not a good fit for the docs, but I would love to see one of the content creators make a tier list of filament customization options ranked in terms of effort it takes. maybe one for tables, one for forms etc.
First off, quality of the docs is pretty decent right now but great you guys look to improve. As a hobbyist developer myself I struggled a little with how to prevent duplicating code. Complicated form fields or table columns or complete forms for example. Had a hard time figuring out what the best approach to this issue was. Would be great to have some examples on this topic.
Yeah its great already, what helped me understand the most was the advanced forms examples and for understanding livewire and customizing things it really helped looking through https://github.com/andrewdwallo/erpsaas so maybe include some more advanced examples. I actually started learning Laravel directly with filament and honestly it felt like cheating, I was going so fast!, I only did plain php before (boss created his own (horrible🤣, xslt, soap etc) framework on my old job.
GitHub
GitHub - andrewdwallo/erpsaas: A Laravel and Filament-powered accou...
A Laravel and Filament-powered accounting platform, crafting a modern and automated solution for financial management. - andrewdwallo/erpsaas
From my perspective, as mentioned above, adding some minor customizations for components and highlighting aspects that were harder to find in the documentation—yet surfaced through community discussions—would be beneficial.
The biggest issue I encountered was with broadcasting. I feel that the documentation in this area could be expanded, particularly around broadcast configuration. This is where I believe improvements to the docs would be most valuable. Additionally, it would be helpful to see more examples of where broadcasting could be implemented, such as in navigation badges, dynamic UI elements, or other interactive components that rely on real-time updates.
I think the documentation indexing needs some tweaking. Search for databaseNotificationsPolling and nothing found. Goto this page
https://filamentphp.com/docs/3.x/panels/notifications#setting-up-websockets-in-a-panel
and you'll see databaseNotificationsPolling('30s')
Pretty sure this is a common issue with not finding code that is there. That would be a useful fix.
Perhaps you could treat the demo as more of a collection of interactive examples? Add a bunch of new resources for things that aren't currently in there (like the builder field), implement broadcasting etc. Could link to specific URLs from the docs and people can code dive on the repo too.
Or if you want to keep the demo clean, maybe a separate examples app to go alongside the docs
Update documentation about Action Filament:
1. Filament Actions vs Laravel Actions
- Is there any documentation explaining the difference between Filament actions and Laravel actions? If such an explanation exists, it would be really helpful.
2. Injecting
- How can I inject
- In some cases, I want my business logic—such as creating a user in the database, sending an email, notifying the admin, etc.—to reside in
- If there is any official guidance on this, that would be great.
3. Getting the current model in
- How can I get the current model's data inside
- I need to pass the current model's data to the modal form inside the action.
- Is there any documentation related to this?
4. Missing
- It seems like there is no
- Are there any plans to introduce this command?
- Is there any documentation explaining the difference between Filament actions and Laravel actions? If such an explanation exists, it would be really helpful.
2. Injecting
app/Actions/CreateUser.php into Filament\Actions\CreateAction::make()- How can I inject
app/Actions/CreateUser.php into Filament\Actions\CreateAction::make()?- In some cases, I want my business logic—such as creating a user in the database, sending an email, notifying the admin, etc.—to reside in
app/Actions/CreateUser.php.- If there is any official guidance on this, that would be great.
3. Getting the current model in
EditAction- How can I get the current model's data inside
EditAction?- I need to pass the current model's data to the modal form inside the action.
- Is there any documentation related to this?
4. Missing
php artisan make:filament-action- It seems like there is no
php artisan make:filament-action command yet.- Are there any plans to introduce this command?
Not sure how it can be helped, but I routinely google something looking for a specific part in docs, and inevitably v2 is the top hit. I suspect the same will happen with v3 when v4 is released
Maybe some auto forwarding to v4 docs (user opt in)
A small win could be including the version number in the title google displays?
Yeah definitely including some "best practices" for this in the docs, but the developer is still free to choose what the best abstraction is for them
At the moment broadcasting is only limited to notifications, hence why the docs are only there
Yeah definitely looking to rewrite the demo
Thanks
@Dan Harrin first, amount of work and craft in Filament is outstanding 🔥
From our small team perspective I can say that getting into Filament really fast to get going (we started in Dec 2023). When I try recall our experience from then:
- it was our first contact with Livewire (I believe that it's very common when starting with :filament: )
- at the very beginning I remember that having only ResourceManager for a whole CRUD felt magical and we had problems with extending create/update actions
- having many implementations of the Actions classes depending on a usage (form, table) and sharing logic between them (I saw in v4 you have tackled this), common when you have same "functionality" in a table and update form
- sometimes new devs have problems with understanding a role of mount, fillForm and it's impact on default values 🙂
Thanks!
The docs are great - for me personally I would have loved some more examples, especially around the form action models - ran into a few things that took me longer to troubleshoot than I would care to admit haha - the advanced forms cookbook was fantastic. Maybe it could be an idea to have somewhere to suggest things to add to those - would require review but could be helpful?