Sometimes there’s that moment in every documentation site’s life when someone other than the developer needs to get in there and make some content changes. Or a simple statically generated site starts to become... not so simple.

Sometimes the answer is absolutely to rebuild in a proper CMS like Statamic, but maybe you don't have time for that. So you just have the writer relay changes to the developer and they make updates in their code editor.

What if there was a third option? That’s why we built Sidecar.

Ride Along, Don’t Take Over

Sidecar lets you edit a static site generator’s Markdown from the Statamic Control Panel—without importing it into collections or asking Statamic to take ownership of it.

Your files stay exactly where they are.

Front matter stays front matter. Folders stay folders. navigation.php stays navigation.php. sidebar.json stays sidebar.json (you get the idea). Your static site generator keeps rendering the site exactly as it did when you woke up this morning to your bowl of Cocoa Puffs.

Sidecar just rides alongside it. Hence the name. 🏍️

You get the parts of Statamic that make managing content pretty darn good:

• A beautiful and intuitive Control Panel
• A proper content tree you can drag and drop to arrange your navs
• Easily customizable publish forms
• Live Preview

And there's no migration necessary. No duplicate source of truth. No elaborate content-syncing contraption held together by webhooks, hope, or an AI agent that keeps missing something in translation.

Different Generators Think Differently

The tricky thing about static site generators is that they don’t all organize content the same way.

LaraDocs uses real folders and front matter for ordering. Jigsaw keeps its hierarchy in navigation.php. VitePress may use folders for routes while its sidebar lives in JSON. HydePHP has its own ideas about indexes, priorities, and published URLs.

Sidecar handles those differences with drivers.

A driver teaches Sidecar where content lives, how its tree works, what should happen when you move a page, and how Live Preview should render. Sidecar doesn’t maintain some secret parallel structure behind the scenes—it projects the tree from the generator’s own files and writes changes back in the format that generator expects.

Right now, Sidecar includes first-party drivers for:

• LaraDocs
• Jigsaw
• VitePress
• HydePHP

Drivers are extensible too, so Hugo, Astro, Docusaurus, or whatever comes lumbering out of the JavaScript forest next can join the party.

Where This Could Go

The obvious use case is documentation.

You’ve got an existing Markdown-powered docs site that developers are perfectly happy maintaining in Git—but now writers, support teams, product folks, and customers need to contribute too. Sidecar could give them a much nicer editing experience without forcing you to rebuild the site or change the deployment pipeline.

But that’s only the beginning.

Sidecar could make Statamic a content studio for all sorts of file-based projects: documentation portals, changelogs, knowledge bases, course material, product catalogs, and any other collection of structured Markdown currently guarded by a code editor and a README nobody has opened since Zendaya had a last name.

One Statamic installation could potentially manage several different sources, each with its own driver, blueprint, tree, and preview. Docs in one folder. A changelog in another. Maybe content belonging to an entirely different application somewhere else.

We think this is a future worth exploring. What do you think?

The Experimental Bit

Sidecar is experimental.

Its APIs may change. Its on-disk behavior may change. There are probably show-stopping bugs we missed in our tests because we're not running large-scale VitePress or Jigsaw sites ourselves.

So use Git. Try it on a branch. Kick the tires and open some GitHub issues so we can tighten the bolts, as it were.

How to Try It

If you're running a Laravel app already (e.g. LaraDocs, HydePHP, etc), you can install Statamic and Sidecar with Composer:

composer require statamic/cms statamic/sidecar
php please install:sidecar

The installer will look for a supported static site generator, help you choose a driver, and configure your first content source.

If you're running VitePress or Jigsaw, you'll need to stand up a new Statamic site next to your existing site and point Sidecar at it. Everything you need to know is in the Sidecar docs.

So tell us what works. Tell us what doesn’t. Tell us which driver you need next and what your particular SSG does that no reasonable person could’ve predicted.

We’re happy to iterate on Sidecar and turn it into something really great, as long as the people want it. That’s the experiment!

Try Sidecar on GitHub, point it at some real content, and take it for a ride.