Laravel Nova Mastery

Welcome to Nova, an outstanding administration panel for Laravel, by Laravel. Let's talk briefly about Nova's mission statement, and what we'll be building using it in this series.

As Nova is a paid product, its installation steps are slightly different from your run-of-the-mill Laravel package. Let's take a look at the steps we'll need to perform before we start using Nova.

Whilst you should generally leave styling to Nova, it does provide easy configuration to officially make it 'yours'. Let's customize Nova so that it matches our Library's branding.

At the core of every Nova project are Resources, and at the core of every library are books! Let's explore the basics of resources in Nova by building one to represent our `Book` model.

So far, the fields in our `Book` resource are a little rough around the edges. Thankfully, Nova allows us to configure all fields using a predictable, declarative API. Let's explore some of the options before we dive any deeper.

You should never judge a book by its cover, but it would be nice to at least see the cover for our Library! Let's explore just a few of the massive variety of field types Nova ships with.

Nova really has made all our CRUD operations a cinch, but it's not magic; if you put bad data in, you'll get bad data out. To prevent that, we need to validate input, just as you would in a Laravel controller. Let's see how we can implement familiar validation rules, Nova style.

Alright, it's time to turn up the heat. Our Book Resource is all alone, but in reality it has many relationships: an author, a publisher, audio recordings… you get the idea. It's laughably simple to add relationships to our admin panel, so let's do it!

We've hit a roadblock - the options that should be available for sub-genre depend on the selected genre. We're in luck, however: Nova makes it a breeze for one field to depend on the value of another. Let's see how in this episode.

Now that we have a handle on simple relationships, we can turn our attention to more complex examples and see how Nova let's us work with custom pivot tables and polymorphic data.

Our admin panel is really starting to take shape! It's still a little clunky in places though, especially when it comes to creating new resources. Let's utilize a few Nova tricks to iron out the kinks.

So far, we've allowed Nova to manage our navigation menu, but things are starting to look a little cluttered. Thankfully, its simple to introduce our own custom menu structure.

We've already briefly discussed the $search property, but we've only just scratched the surface. Let's look at how we can find anything instantly using Nova's powerful search tool integrations.

Though search gets us a long way, sometimes you just want a filtered index. We've already looked at simple field filters, but what if you want something more custom? No sweat!

Resources are great, but sometimes you require a custom index with custom columns for more specific use cases. We can transform our index to suit our needs using a neat feature called Lenses, so let's create a Stock view for our Book Resource.

Can you believe we're this far into a series about admin panels and haven't so much as mentioned a line chart? Let's fix that using Nova's simple-yet-versatile metric tools.

Actions allow us to perform custom logic to do just about anything we can think of at the click of a button. In our case, we'll use them to make managing reviews a cinch for our administrators.

More often than not, you'll need some additional details from the user before running an action. We've already looked at many of the fields Nova offers, so let's now see how we can use them to pass information into an action.

If your action takes a while to run, the last thing you want is to sit in front of the screen waiting for it to complete. Instead, let's see how we can defer actions to Laravel's queue, and how we can batch related queued actions together.

So far, all users of our admin panel can see all data and run any action. You probably don't want that, so let's see how Nova seamlessly integrates with Laravel's authorization features to allow us to scope access.

See that bell icon? Well, Nova has its very own notification tray where we can update administrators on important changes to our application. Let's see how to build Nova notifications and dispatch them from anywhere.

Almost all of your field requirements will be covered out of the box. Occasionally though, you'll want to reach for something a little more custom. Let's build a fun little 'star indicator' for our review resource.

We've played a little with cards already; every Nova metric is presented in a card at the top of the page. Did you know you can build your own cards that can contain anything you'd like? Let me show you.

When your app needs to go beyond CRUD, Nova travels with you. Custom tools give you the ultimate freedom to build anything you'd like, whilst still staying within the chrome of Nova.

Well done, you're now a Nova Master! With your learnings from this series, you have everything you need to build awesome admin panels. There are a couple of things you should do before hitting deploy, so let's briefly tackle them before we wrap things up.