- What is eminiarts/aura-notifications used for?
- It is a notification plugin for Aura CMS, a Laravel-based CMS, adding a sidebar bell, slide-over panel, read and unread tracking, and system updates. It is aimed at keeping users informed without building notification plumbing from scratch. It is not a general-purpose Laravel package; its UI features assume the Aura host application.
- Can I use aura-notifications in a standard Laravel app without Aura CMS?
- Only partially. The reusable surface is limited to the underlying notification classes and migrations, while the sidebar bell, slide-over panel, and team filtering hook into Aura's Blade and Livewire layout. On vanilla Laravel or another admin stack such as Filament or Nova, the UI layer would be dead weight and could conflict with your layout.
- How do I install aura-notifications?
- Install it with Composer using composer require eminiarts/aura-notifications. Then publish the migrations and frontend assets, register the service provider, and ensure your User model uses Laravel's Notifiable trait. For an existing Aura install that already has notification UI, expect to resolve conflicts in the sidebar slot and layout partials.
- Which Laravel and PHP versions does aura-notifications support?
- The published notes do not include a dependency matrix, so there is no stated Laravel version range, PHP requirement, or Aura core constraint. Inspect the package's composer.json before committing. This is the largest unknown for adoption and should be resolved early.
- Does aura-notifications use Laravel's standard notifications table?
- That is not clearly documented. The package appears to contain two subsystems: a thin wrapper over Laravel's database notification channel and a plugin-owned announcement or system-updates feed, possibly scoped by team. Check the published migrations to confirm whether it writes to Laravel's notifications table or adds its own tables, because that affects backups, migrations, and how your own notification types appear in the panel.
- How do I create and publish system updates?
- The authoring workflow is not described in the release notes. It is unclear whether updates are created through an admin UI, an Artisan command, or code-level seeding, and who can publish global versus team-scoped updates. Ask the vendor or inspect the package source before planning this part of your implementation.
- How does the notification bell get its unread count?
- The UI appears to be polling-style, based on the described sidebar bell and slide-over panel. The notes do not document a broadcast, websocket, or queue setup, so real-time behavior is unverified and the polling interval is not stated. Confirm the refresh mechanism and query cost at your expected user count.
- Does aura-notifications support teams?
- Yes, team filtering is listed as a capability, but it hooks into Aura CMS's team model rather than a generic Laravel teams implementation. That makes it useful inside Aura but not portable to other applications. Treat team-scoped announcements as a separate data model from Laravel's standard notifications.
- Is aura-notifications production ready and actively maintained?
- Version 1.0.0 is the first public release, so there is no deprecation history or proven upgrade path and the API should be treated as unstable until 1.x settles. It is published by a single vendor tied to a single CMS, and the notes do not mention license terms, security disclosure policy, test coverage, or CI status. Assess bus-factor and abandonment risk before relying on it.
- What frontend stack does aura-notifications require?
- The dark-mode styling, slide-over panel, and toggle behavior strongly suggest Tailwind CSS, Livewire, and Alpine.js, matching Aura CMS's frontend. Confirm this against your own design system, because overriding published views is likely if your stack or theme differs. Theme upgrades to Aura can also break the bell and panel without a version bump in this package.