How to set up Blade (instead of Antlers) in Statamic

Following on from my thoughts late last year about heading towards Blade instead of Antlers in Statamic, I’ve been rebuilding the Starter Kit I use for new Statamic sites in Blade, and thought it’d be a great opportunity to share how to get up and running from a clean Statamic install.

With this video, I take a brand new Statamic 6 install, and do just that: get up and running with Blade instead of Antlers.

When you do a new Statamic install, your templates will be Antlers. It is easy to learn, and incredibly powerful - but also may be a new thing you need to learn.

If you're coming to Statamic from a Laravel (or Livewire) background, learning Antlers is a potential barrier to faster adoption: it is like Blade, but different. Both use curly braces… there are similarities with conditionals… but one requires a $ for variables, and the other doesn’t. They’re close enough that you need to be on your toes to remember what project you’re working in.

Did you know that Statamic also allows you to use Blade for your templates, instead of Antlers (or even alongside Antlers)?

I'm enjoying using Blade for my Statamic sites, as it creates less mental friction when switching between a Livewire project and a Statamic project - but also makes it a cleaner project structure for when I need to use Livewire in a Statamic project itself.

I mention it in the video, but to re-iterate, there’s nothing wrong with Antlers: it is easy to learn, powerful and I’m not here to rain on its parade… but for the sort of work that I do these days that covers Livewire and Statamic, Blade does make a bit more sense to avoid those mental context switches.

What do you think? Are you team Antlers? Team Blade? Team Blantlers? That’s both Blade and Antlers in case you missed it.

I love what Blade components can give me, and also keeps me in Blade-land mentally regardless of the project - and the impact of that is not to be underestimated - and like anything, getting yourself set up with the right footing will help streamline your development experience.