What Macsi Digital Is Building
An update on last year's plans: GlowKit, client work in Laravel and Filament, and over a million package downloads.
In April 2025 I wrote a list of what was coming for Macsi Digital: new client work, a tidy-up of our open-source packages, an e-commerce product, an AI-first tool and a fresh look at our tooling. Rather than tick through that list one by one, here's what we're focused on now.
GlowKit
The biggest piece of work is GlowKit, our CMS for Laravel. It's what this blog and macsi.digital run on.
- Pages edited in place. You change the real page, not a form that describes it.
- Themes per site. Each site can have a design of its own without forking the platform.
- Modules you switch on. A blog, newsletters, a shop and payments, plus sector packages, all sitting on the same core.
- An AI assistant. It drafts pages, rewrites sections and tidies menus. Every change goes into a draft that a person reviews before anything is published.
That last point matters to me. AI is useful for getting a first draft down quickly, but the person who owns the site should always make the final call.
Client work
Laravel is still our main framework and Filament is still our admin panel of choice. We now build on Filament 5. The brief hasn't changed: software that's maintainable long after launch, for startups, growing businesses and established organisations.
When I set out our plans, I said we'd look beyond our usual stack, and we did. We now build front ends in React with Inertia, and desktop and mobile apps with NativePHP. We've also dabbled in Odoo, and a few clients now have sites running happily on it.
Open source
We did archive some older API clients that we couldn't keep up with. The packages we kept are in better shape for it, and between them they've now passed 1,000,000 downloads. Thank you to everyone who uses them, reports issues and sends fixes.
How we work
Day to day it's Macs and Laravel Herd locally, and Laravel Forge with zero-downtime releases for deployment. Herd made the move from our old Homestead setup a long time ago, and I haven't looked back.
What's next
More GlowKit, more posts like this one, and hopefully a better balance between building our own products and building for clients. Stay tuned.