What 183 admin pages look like — building a full Laravel CMS in 2026

A year ago I started building a CMS because I had three options for client work and none fit: WordPress — works, but 250+ plugin CVEs/week (Patchstack 2024). I patch sites every week. Tired of it. Contentful / Sanity — modern, but $300/mo entry pricing for SMB use cases. Vendor lock is real. Strapi / Payload — solid, but Node-only. I'm a PHP/Laravel shop. So I built UnfoldCMS — a self-hosted Laravel CMS that ships as a single product, not a framework you assemble. This post is a tour of what's a