Laravel Nova – Laravel’s Admin Panel

Nova makes it a breeze to perform administration tasks on your Laravel project, and the best part is that it leverages all of your existing code! All you need to do is configure your Nova Resources to tell the admin panel how to work with your Laravel Models. If you so choose, you can also build metrics and administration tools.

Before I start telling you about all the wonderful things you can do with Nova, you’ll need to know why the Laravel Framework is gaining exponential popularity while all other PHP frameworks seem to be falling by the wayside. To get the lowdown on the hoedown, read Why I Decided To Embrace Laravel to see what Laravel can do.

By the way, if you’re considering WordPress instead of Laravel, remember that while WordPress has its uses, you need to be careful when building with it.

Nova Resources

Resources describe how you want your admin area to display your database data. There are four places where your this information gets used.

  1. The Resource’s index page
  2. The details page which describes a row in your database table
  3. The form page to create a new row in the database
  4. The form page to update a row in the database

To describe how to work with the row of data, you need to configure each column you’d like Nova to use. Let’s start with a basic textbox to display the email address for a user.

use Laravel\Nova\Fields\Text;
Text::make('email');

That says to display the email address on the index page, details page, and on both types of forms. You can make it display only on the pages you so desire, and that’s done with a selection of helper methods as outlined in the documentation.

Nova Metrics

Nova admin panel Metric

Nova Metric

Metrics allow you to display things important to your administration team, such as KPIs. (Your NPS score is critical! Do you know yours?) There are three types of metrics to choose from.

  1. Value Metric (Just a simple number)
  2. Trend Metric (Shown above)
  3. Partition Metric (Pie chart)

The type to choose depends on the data you’re trying to display.

Nova Actions

Nova admin panel Action

Nova Action

Actions allow you to perform administrative tasks on one or more rows of data. They’re completely programmable to your needs, so there’s no list of them to have to choose from.

Fully Customizable – Tools and More!

I value your time, and if you’re like me you’d rather not read a lengthy article, instead favoring a small, concise primer to wet your taste buds. Hopefully this article has intrigued you enough to take a closer look at the Laravel Nova admin panel for your next project.

There are far more opportunities for you to configure Nova to your needs, so feel free to peruse the documentation for Nova.