Nova Sortable 5 Laravel Package

Product Decisions This Supports

• Nova 5 upgrade readiness: The fix to indexQuery() and adoption of Nova's DependentFormField mixin signal active Nova 5 support. This informs the decision to migrate admin panels to Nova 5 without losing drag-and-drop ordering in resource tables.
• Buy vs. build: A sortable/reorder field is a small but non-trivial UI + backend concern (drag & drop, order column persistence, form state binding). Adopting this package avoids building and maintaining custom Vue components against Nova's internal APIs.
• Feature scoping for content-heavy admin tools: Ordering is relevant wherever editors curate sequences — CMS pages, FAQ items, menu entries, media galleries, onboarding steps. This supports roadmap items that surface manual ordering to non-technical operators.
• Reduced engineering overhead in the admin layer: The create/update form fix removes a class of client-side errors that would otherwise surface as support tickets ("save button broken on edit screen"), lowering the maintenance tax of admin tooling.

When to Consider This Package

Consider adoption when:

• You use Laravel Nova (ideally Nova 5, given this release's contract alignment) and need per-resource manual ordering of records.
• Editors, not developers, need to control display order — and the order must be edited in the UI rather than via a migration or seeder.
• Your model already has (or can add) a single integer order-style column and a scoped sorting context (e.g., per parent record, per category).
• You want drag-and-drop on the index view without maintaining a forked Vue component.

Look elsewhere or build in-house when:

• You are not on Nova, or you are on an older Nova major without verified compatibility — the v1.0.4 changes are explicitly Nova 5 target fixes, so earlier-version behavior is not validated by this release.
• You need multi-tenant, per-locale, or per-user ordering semantics; a single sort column usually won't cover composite scopes without custom work.
• The ordering is high-churn or algorithmic (auto-sorting, ranked lists, scoring) rather than human-curated.
• You can't accept a third-party dependency in the admin layer, or the ordering requirement is a one-off that a simple order column plus Nova's built-in index sorting already satisfies.

How to Pitch It (Stakeholders)

To executives: This is a small, low-risk dependency that lets content editors reorder items in our admin panel by dragging and dropping, instead of filing engineering requests. The latest release fixes compatibility with Nova 5 and removes a form-submission bug on edit screens — meaning it's actively maintained and tracks the current Nova version. Cost of adoption is minimal; the alternative is custom component work we'd own indefinitely.

To engineering: The v1.0.4 release is a maintenance patch with real signal — it corrects the indexQuery() signature to match Nova 5's Resource::indexQuery() contract, restricts the order field to index/detail views so it no longer breaks create/update submissions (t.fill is not a function), and moves FormSortable.vue to Options API using Nova's DependentFormField mixin for correct fill() binding. Net effect: Nova 5 compatibility plus a removed class of front-end form errors. No breaking API changes, no migrations, no config changes — a drop-in patch upgrade. Recommended action: bump the dependency, smoke-test one sortable resource's index reorder and one create form, and confirm the order column is not being written during create/update.

Residual risk to note: the package follows Nova's internal APIs, so future Nova majors may require similar catch-up releases. Pin the version and re-check compatibility on each Nova upgrade.