Product Decisions This Supports
- Admin UX / information architecture (internal tooling only). Nova admin panels with 20+ resources quickly produce a flat, unscannable sidebar. This package addresses a real ergonomic problem — grouping resources into collapsible categories — which is a genuine (if minor) productivity lever for internal ops, support, and content teams who live in the admin daily.
- Build vs. buy vs. native. This is a "buy" that is really a "borrow." Before considering it, confirm what Laravel Nova already gives you:
public static $group on resources, and Nova 4's Nova::mainMenu() / custom menu APIs cover most of the same ground. If native grouping is sufficient, this is a zero-cost decision to not adopt.
- Roadmap impact: near zero. This is not a differentiator, not customer-facing, and should never appear on a roadmap as a feature. It belongs in the "admin quality-of-life" bucket of engineering chores, funded only if the admin panel is genuinely painful to use.
- Dependency risk budgeting. With 4 stars, 0 dependents, and an archived repository, this is not a dependency you adopt — it is a snippet of code you vendored and own. The PM decision is effectively "do we spend 1–2 days of engineering time replicating a small UI concept?" and the answer is only yes if the need is concrete and measured.
- Signal on the "opportunity" score. A relatively high opportunity score against a very low overall score is the classic signature of an unserved niche — nobody is maintaining a solution because the problem is small and mostly solved natively. That is a reason to build in-house, not a reason to adopt an abandoned package.
When to Consider This Package
Consider it only if all of the following hold:
- You are on Laravel Nova 3.x or earlier (last release 2020-09-23 predates Nova 4's navigation overhaul; assume incompatibility with modern Nova until proven otherwise).
- Your admin panel has enough resources that the native single-level
$group is visibly insufficient — i.e., you want nesting, collapsible categories, or category metadata, and you have user complaints or support tickets to prove it.
- You have a willingness to fork and own the code — pin it, vendor it into your repo, or reimplement the ~small surface area internally under the MIT license.
- The admin panel is internal-only, so a stale UI dependency carries no customer-facing or compliance exposure.
Look elsewhere (or build in-house) if:
- You are on Nova 4+ — use
Nova::mainMenu() and native grouping instead; this package will likely break.
- You are not using Nova at all (e.g., Filament, Backpack, custom Livewire/Inertia admin) — irrelevant, despite the generic-sounding name.
- Your standards require maintained dependencies with security patching, an active issue tracker, or vendor support — an archived repo with 0 dependents has no support path, no Stack Overflow coverage, and no upgrade guarantee.
- You need more than cosmetic grouping — search across resources, role-based menu visibility, custom dashboards. That is a build decision with a real design brief, not a package decision.
How to Pitch It (Stakeholders)
To executives: This is a small, free, MIT-licensed utility for our internal admin panel that tidies the navigation sidebar into categories. It is not customer-facing, carries no licensing cost, and affects zero revenue paths. However, it is archived and unmaintained since 2020, so I do not recommend taking it as a dependency. The right move is to treat it as a design reference and have engineering implement the equivalent in roughly a day, or use the grouping features Laravel Nova already ships. Net ask: no budget, minimal engineering time, and no long-term maintenance obligation.
To engineering: The package groups Nova resources into categories in the sidebar. It has 4 stars, 0 dependents, and was last released in September 2020, so treat it as a code sample rather than a dependency — read it, then reimplement or vendor it. First check whether Nova's native $group / mainMenu already satisfies the requirement; if it does, the decision is closed with zero work. If we do adopt the concept, pin the version, fork it into our own namespace, and add a line to the tech-debt log noting we own it. Do not add it to composer.json as a straight dependency.
Recommendation: Do not adopt as a dependency. Use as reference, or prefer native Nova navigation.