How We Structured Marketing Data in Laravel Using Filament Clusters

The Messy Reality of Growing Laravel Admin Panels

When you're building a full-stack app like AustinsElite—where the frontend runs on Laravel 12 but the backend logic and content management live in Laravel—admin panel hygiene becomes critical. Early on, we treated our Laravel admin as a side concern: resources were dumped into the Filament dashboard with little structure. As the marketing team started relying on it to manage forms, products, and campaign data, chaos followed.

Suddenly, finding FormSubmission meant scrolling past User, Order, BlogPost, and five other unrelated resources. Onboarding new developers? "Yeah, good luck figuring out what goes where." We had a sprawl problem—and it was slowing us down.

The frontend was clean, modern, and component-driven. The backend dashboard felt like a junk drawer.

Introducing the MarketingResources Cluster in Filament

The fix wasn’t more documentation or better naming—it was structure. With Filament’s support for resource clusters, we created a dedicated MarketingResources cluster to group all marketing-related admin functionality under one logical umbrella.

Here’s how we set it up:

// app/Filament/Clusters/MarketingResources.php
use Filament\Clusters\Cluster;

class MarketingResources extends Cluster
{
    protected static ?string $icon = 'heroicon-o-megaphone';

    public static function getNavigationLabel(): string
    {
        return 'Marketing';
    }
}

Then, we moved four key resources into it:

• FormSubmission
• ProductCategory
• Product
• Req (short for "Request," used for lead capture)

Each resource now uses the MarketingResources cluster:

// app/Filament/Resources/FormSubmissionResource.php
use App\Filament\Clusters\MarketingResources;

public static function getCluster(): ?string
{
    return MarketingResources::class;
}

This small change had an immediate impact. Instead of a flat list of 15+ resources, our admin sidebar now shows a collapsible "Marketing" section with clear, scoped entries. Click it, and you’re in the right context.

Why Clusters Matter for Developer Velocity

This isn’t just about looking tidy. Organizing resources into clusters improves real-world developer experience in three key ways:

1. Faster navigation and onboarding New team members can now grasp the domain structure at a glance. "Where do I go to edit product categories?" → "Under Marketing, obviously." No more guessing or grepping through files.

2. Cleaner permission scoping With all marketing resources grouped, we can now apply role-based access more predictably. For example, marketing analysts get view/edit access to everything under MarketingResources, but nothing else. This pattern makes policy logic easier to write and audit.

3. Future extensibility without sprawl We’re already planning to add Campaign, LandingPage, and A/BTest resources. Thanks to the cluster, they’ll land in the right place from day one. No refactoring, no tech debt accumulation.

This refactor was part of a broader February 2025 push to modernize the AustinsElite backend architecture. Even though the frontend is a Laravel 12 app, the Laravel 12 backend is where content and data workflows live—and keeping it organized ensures the whole system scales cleanly.

Final Thoughts: Structure Scales With You

It’s easy to treat admin panels as afterthoughts, especially when your frontend gets all the spotlight. But in content-heavy, admin-driven apps like AustinsElite, the backend UX matters just as much.

Filament’s clusters are a simple, powerful tool for bringing order to complexity. We didn’t need a custom CMS or a new framework—just a few minutes to group related things together.

If you’re using Laravel with Filament and feeling the pain of a cluttered admin, try this: pick one domain (like marketing, sales, or content), create a cluster, and move three related resources into it. You’ll be surprised how much clarity a little structure brings.