A Laravel CMS starter kit: laravel new, with Filament or Nova

A Laravel starter kit gives you a sign-in, a dashboard and a front end to build on. That is the right start for an application. For a website it leaves out what the client asks about on the first day: where do I write a post, change the menu, upload a picture?

kitloom now starts the way those kits do, from the Laravel installer:

laravel new my-site --using=kitloom/filament-skeleton --phpunit -v

What comes out is a Laravel 13 site an AI agent can run with the rights you give it: an MCP server at /mcp, posts, pages, media and menus in a Filament admin your editors already know, and a theme of your choice, filled with a demo if you want one.

Before the command

The kit is public, the packages it installs are not: kitloom is paid. Your purchase email has a name and a token. Save them once per machine, and tell Composer where the skeleton comes from:

composer config --global http-basic.packages.kitloom.dev <your-name> <your-token>
composer config --global repositories.kitloom composer https://packages.kitloom.dev

You need PHP 8.4 or newer. For Laravel Nova the kit is kitloom/nova-skeleton; Nova's own license comes from Laravel.

Two flags matter. -v lets the installer ask its questions: without it Composer runs behind a progress bar, and the site keeps the usual modules with no theme. --phpunit keeps the site's tests on PHPUnit: without it the installer moves them to Pest and prints warnings about a workflow file the kit does not have.

What it asks

1. Themes, none ticked. A theme keeps the modules it needs and says so.
2. The active theme, or none: then the site answers with JSON, for a front end of your own.
3. Modules, group by group, with the usual ones ticked: SEO, forms, redirects, two-factor sign-in, the REST API, AI agents, backups. The shop, bookings, courses and the rest are there to tick.
4. The demo: posts, pages, menus and widgets, so the theme looks lived in.

What you leave out goes with composer remove, so composer.json names exactly what the site runs. A module left out comes back later with composer require.

We ran this from the kit's public repositories with an empty Composer cache, the Garland theme and its demo: under three minutes for each admin, on a development machine. The front page, /wp-json/ and the admin's login answered, and the site's tests passed. A Vue or React theme adds its build to that.

What you have then

An agent that can run it. In the admin, AI agents → Connect an agent gives you the address. Claude, ChatGPT or Cursor sign in without a key to copy, and work with the rights of the user who approved them. Ask for "a page about our opening hours, in the main menu" and the tools it reaches for, such as create_content, go through the same code as the admin.

An admin for the editors. Filament 5 at /admin or Nova 5 at /nova: posts, pages, media, menus, users and a Modules screen that switches modules on and off.

A front end you choose. A theme in Blade, Vue or React, switched with php artisan site:theme or in Appearance → Themes. No build is needed for the switch, as npm run build builds every theme you kept.

A project that explains itself to whoever codes in it. The kit brings AGENTS.md, CLAUDE.md and a deploy skill. php artisan kitloom:make-module Reviews and php artisan kitloom:make-theme Recipes write code of your own, and php artisan kitloom:deploy-kit server --domain=example.com writes what the server needs. The tests in tests/ are yours; kitloom's stay with its packages.

And your WordPress site, if you have one. It comes along with its database, addresses and users.

How it differs from Laravel's own kits

Laravel's kits start an application: Fortify's sign-in on the users table, and a dashboard to build from. They are the better start when the product is the application.

kitloom's kit starts a site. Its users live in WordPress's user table, with the site's own sign-in, two-factor, social login and account sections, so it is not a layer over those kits. It runs on WordPress's data model and no WordPress code at all.

Without the installer

Composer alone creates the same site, and needs only the first of the two lines above:

composer create-project kitloom/filament-skeleton my-site --repository=https://packages.kitloom.dev --add-repository

Try it

Before you buy, open a sandbox in one click, with no sign-up: Filament or Nova. You can read what a site starts from in kitloom/filament-starter and kitloom/nova-starter. Every question and flag is in the installation guide.