Laracon is here again. For those of you that don’t know, Laracon is the event where that happens every 6 months where we get a look at the latest and greatest in Laravel.
We’ll write an article on the latest features in Laravel once we’ve compiled them. But, for now, let’s talk about Nova.
Laravel’s Nova is a beautifully designed administration panel designed by the team behind Laravel.
Nova is a single-page application built on the Vue.js ecosystem and Tailwind. Not only does it look cool, it’s also highly customizable in a true Laravel fashion.
Nova is not yet out for public consumption, and it’s a paid product, but if a highly customizable dashboard is what you need, you can signup and get alerted when it goes live next month.
Calling it an admin dashboard doesn’t do it justice. I definitely recommend giving Taylor’s keynote a watch. The features just don’t stop:
If you head over to Nova’s landing page, you’ll see that it has quite a handful of features like:
- Resource Management: allows for quick integration of your models to your dashboard. It supports all Eloquent relationships including pivot tables.
- Actions: Actions are PHP tasks that you can run against a resource or batch of resources. Have an action that takes a while? No problem, Nova’s queued actions will keep your administration panel feeling snappy.
- Filters: Write custom filters for your resource indexes to offer your users quick glances at different segments of your data. To get you started, we’ve included built-in filters for “soft deleted” resources.
- Lenses: Need to customize a resource list a little more than a filter can provide? No problem. Add lenses to your resource to take full control over the entire Eloquent query.
- Metrics: Nova makes it painless to quickly display custom metrics for your application, allowing you to generate three types of graphs in seconds. To put the cherry on top, we’ve included query helpers to make it all easy as pie.
- Authorization: Nova is beautifully integrated with Laravel’s existing authorization policies. Let your Nova resources automatically leverage your existing application policies to determine a user’s abilities. Fine-grained authorization support is even provided for relationships, tools, actions, lenses, and fields.
- Custom Fields: Need a field type that isn’t included with Nova? No problem – use the Nova CLI to generate a custom field and take total control over its implementation and design.
- Scout search integration: Feel the power of the Laravel ecosystem by linking your Nova administration panel with Laravel Scout. Once you do, you’ll get blazing fast search results powered by Algolia and the cloud.
- Custom Tools: Nova offers CLI generators for scaffolding your own custom tools. We’ll give you a Vue component and infinite possibilities. Build the custom tools your business requires, or build the next great Nova add-on and share it with the world.
Nova is targeted at general administration management while Spark is more focus on SaaS platforms. Here’s a tweet straight from the horses’ mouth.
Personally, Nova is something I will definitely be interested in using. I currently use WordPress as the administration dashboards of my Laravel projects and wouldn’t mind trying out something like this.
Is this something you might use?