The Splain manual

Splain is a self-hosted Laravel / Filament plugin for guided, in-app walkthroughs — spotlights over your real UI, anchored to your code, checked before anything ships. This manual is the same documentation that ships inside the package.

New here? Read in this order:

1. Installation — composer, migrations, the plugin line, and splain:doctor to verify the wiring.
2. Playback — what your users see: the dot, the launcher, spotlights, decisions, cross-page hand-offs.
3. Authoring guides — how guides are written, and the one trap that matters most: describing the workflow that's really used, not just what the interface allows.
4. splain:check — the validator that replays every guide before it ships, and fails loudly instead of letting guidance rot.

Then, as you need them:

• Privacy Mode — blur and cover flagged regions for demos and screen recordings. A presentation aid, not a security control.
• The Studio — the visual editor: design mode on the live page, review flags, and the attested publishing gate.
• Tracks & progress — onboarding checklists and (off by default) server-side completion recording. Pointer, never a copy of personal data.
• Generation — drafting guides with a model you configure. Splain ships no key and no default endpoint.
• Adapters — Filament is the first-class adapter; the standalone adapter runs the same engine anywhere.
• CI & the drift gate — guides-as-code, and the build gate that fails when code deletes an anchor a guide depends on.
• Guide schema — the full JSON reference.

Release status: Splain is not on Packagist yet — the license is being finalized. These docs describe shipped, tested behavior; install today is via a private repository for early-access hosts.

The documentation is rendered from the package repository — the same files that ship with Splain — so the site can't drift from the code.