Nova Rating Field Laravel Package

Product Decisions This Supports

• Back-office rating capture, not customer-facing product surface. This package adds a star input to a Laravel Nova resource form/detail view. It supports internal workflows — moderation triage, editorial QA scores, vendor/supplier scorecards, support-ticket quality review, internal 360 feedback, CSAT/NPS follow-up logging — and does nothing for the end-user rating experience. Frame any roadmap conversation accordingly: this is ops tooling, not a feature customers see.
• A build-vs-buy call on a very small surface. The decision this most informs is whether a ~100-line UI field (a Nova Field subclass plus a Vue component) justifies an external dependency. Default answer should be build it in-house; the package is more useful as a reference implementation than as a dependency.
• Prototyping internal workflows before committing to real tooling. If we're unsure whether scoring records in admin is a workflow the team will actually adopt, this gets us a testable version in an afternoon and lets usage data drive the next investment.
• Roadmap sequencing for admin/ops tooling. If rating capture is a prerequisite for a reporting or prioritization feature (e.g. "show lowest-rated vendors first"), this unblocks a spike but not a launch — sorting, filtering, and aggregation by rating are almost certainly out of scope and would need to be built.

When to Consider This Package

Adopt (narrowly) when:

• You are already running Laravel Nova and need a star input wired up today.
• The use is internal admin only — no customer-facing, compliance, or audit-trail requirements.
• Your team is willing to vendor/fork the code rather than track upstream; treat it as copied source, not a maintained dependency.
• You've verified it against your specific Nova major version in a scratch branch before it touches a shared environment.

Look elsewhere (or build) when:

• The health signals are the story. Zero stars, zero dependents, a score of 0, and a one-line description with a typo ("start rating") mean no community validation and no evidence of maintenance. Single-maintainer, low-traffic packages are a supply-chain liability in an admin panel that touches your production data.
• Nova's upgrade cadence will break it. Nova majors churn Field/Vue APIs; an unmaintained field is a recurring upgrade tax on every Nova bump.
• You need more than a plain 1–5 integer input: half-stars, read-only/index display, sorting or filtering by rating, aggregate averages, multi-criteria ratings, i18n, keyboard accessibility, or validation/authorization at the domain layer.
• You're not already on Nova. The Nova license cost is the real line item here; if you're choosing an admin stack now, weigh Filament (free, larger ecosystem, similar field primitives) before letting a star field drive the decision.

How to Pitch It (Stakeholders)

One-liner: A small add-on that puts a star-rating input into our Laravel Nova admin panel, so ops teams can score records without a custom build.

For executives: Scope is tiny and cost is effectively zero, with no customer-facing impact — but it is not a validated dependency. Zero stars and zero dependents mean nobody else is betting on it. Treat it as a prototype or a reference, and budget roughly a day of engineering to own the code ourselves rather than inherit upgrade risk.

For engineering: It's a thin Nova Field wrapper — a PHP field class and a Vue component. Recommendation is to read it, then reimplement in-house (~half a day to a day, including tests), or vendor a pinned copy with an owner attached. Either way it should not be a floating composer require in a long-lived admin app.

Decision requested: Approve in-house implementation as the default; use this package only as a spike/reference.