October Amber

Form, List and UI tools for Laravel and October CMS.

Amber is the foundation layer for rendering forms, lists, filters and other backend widgets. It is the same widget engine that powers the October CMS admin panel, packaged as a standalone library so it can be used anywhere. This includes front-end pages, inside October CMS themes/components, or directly from a plain Laravel route/controller.

What is this?

Amber provides a reusable, YAML-driven widget system for building data-editing interfaces. It is not tied to a specific application shell. Use it to:

• Render forms and lists in a regular Laravel app, outside of any CMS.
• Build the field-rendering pipeline inside October CMS itself.
• Compose admin-style UIs from configuration rather than hand-written markup.

In short, Amber is the wider abstraction that sits below October's backend module; the part that knows how to turn a fields.yaml into a working form, or a set of columns.yaml into a sortable list.

Each widget implements the Larajax ViewComponentInterface, so AJAX handlers (uploads, validation, partial updates, etc.) are wired in automatically the same way as any other Larajax view component. A widget rendered by Amber behaves like a first-class Larajax component on the page.

Requirements

• PHP 8.2 or higher
• Laravel 12
• october/rain (used for the underlying database, validation, and HTML helpers)
• larajax/larajax (provides the View Component interface widgets implement)

Installation

composer require october/amber

The package registers an AmberServiceProvider automatically via Laravel's package discovery.

Usage

Build a widget inline in your controller action with Form::make(...), then pass it to the view:

use App\Models\User;
use October\Amber\Widgets\Form;

public function edit($id)
{
    $user = User::findOrFail($id);

    $form = Form::make([
        'model' => $user,
        'fields' => '~/resources/amber/user/fields.yaml',
    ]);

    return view('users.edit', ['form' => $form]);
}

Form::make([...]) constructs the widget, binds it to the current controller, and returns it. The widget is a regular PHP object after that - pass it to the view, store it in a variable, do whatever you would do with any other object. AJAX handlers defined on the widget (file uploads, inline validation, partial reloads, etc.) are wired up automatically.

Render the widget in a Blade view:

{!! $form->render() !!}

Amber widgets are Larajax view components, and Form::make is the standard inline registration pattern documented there. For details on how the action lifecycle handles AJAX requests, how to guard side effects with request()->ajax(), or how to use widgets outside a LarajaxController, see the Larajax docs.

Included Widgets

• Form - YAML or array-driven form builder with field widgets (text, dropdown, repeater, file upload, etc.)
• Lists - sortable, paginated record lists with column types and row actions
• ListStructure - tree and reorderable list variants
• Filter - scope-based filtering for list views
• Toolbar - action buttons and search bar