Nova Resource Group Menu Laravel Package

Product Decisions This Supports

• Admin information architecture, not feature development. The package answers one product question: should the Nova sidebar stay a flat list, or become collapsible groups (Billing, Catalog, Support, Users & Access)? Past roughly 15–20 resources, operators start hunting through a scrolling list — this lets us test grouped navigation as configuration rather than a commissioned build.
• Reframing cost to protect roadmap. "Group our 30 Nova resources into five domains" otherwise competes with revenue-generating work. Framed as a spike-and-config exercise, the cost drops from a sprint to half a day, and the real build decision can wait for operator evidence.
• Build vs. buy, inverted. At MIT and zero license cost, "buy" is free. The actual decision is build vs. borrow: do we own an abandoned dependency (27 stars, 0 dependents, last release May 2020) or spend 1–2 days reimplementing ~100 lines against Nova's native mainMenu() API?
• A forcing function for upgrade drift. The 2020 release date makes "are we still on Nova 2/3, and is that deliberate?" an explicit product question with downstream consequences for security posture, support contracts, and future admin roadmap work.
• Converting a vague complaint into evidence. "The admin is hard to navigate" is an anecdote. A collapsible-group prototype makes it measurable — time-to-find a resource, "where is X" support tickets, operator survey scores — which is the artifact you bring to prioritization.
• Best-fit use cases: back-office CRUD consoles, multi-domain ops panels, multi-tenant admin surfaces — anywhere sidebar density, not resource sprawl, is the top named operator complaint.

When to Consider This Package

Adopt only when all of these hold:

• You are pinned to Laravel Nova 2.x or 3.x with no upgrade planned in the next 1–2 quarters.
• Flat navigation is a validated, named pain point — not a hunch from a design review.
• A PHP/Laravel owner will vendor or fork the source; with zero dependents there is no community safety net, no issue triage, no compatibility guarantee.
• The team accepts reading Nova menu internals to debug conflicts, and will ship a boot-and-render smoke test in CI.

Look elsewhere — or do nothing — when:

• You're on Nova 4 or 5. Native Nova::mainMenu() with MenuGroup/MenuSection covers this directly; this package patches Nova 2/3 menu internals and almost certainly does not survive the Vue 3/Inertia rewrite.
• You're greenfield — standing up a new admin panel on an abandoned Nova-3-era artifact is a poor default.
• Dependency-approval checklists apply; low stars, zero dependents, and stale releases fail most audit gates, and fighting that process costs more than the build.
• The real problem is resource count or permission sprawl, not nesting. Trimming exposure is cheaper than nesting it.
• A one-to-two-day in-house Nova tool would deliver the same result with an owner's name on the git blame.

How to Pitch It (Stakeholders)

To executives (30-second version): A free, MIT-licensed add-on that nests Nova resources under collapsible groups in the admin sidebar. The cost isn't money — it's ownership. With ~27 stars, zero downstream users, and no release since May 2020, if it breaks we fix it ourselves, on our own clock, with no vendor to call. Recommendation: do not adopt as a standing dependency. On Nova 4+ the capability is native and this package is likely incompatible; on older Nova, a short in-house implementation we own is the cheaper long-term path. Opportunity signal is low — this is convenience and internal polish, not differentiation.

To engineering (working summary): A thin presentation-layer tool that injects hierarchical sub-menus into the Nova sidebar, driven off each Resource's static $group. Two risks: (1) it patches Nova 2/3 menu internals and almost certainly doesn't survive Nova 4's mainMenu/MenuGroup refactor; (2) unmaintained since 2020 with zero dependents means nobody has incidentally compatibility-tested it against our Nova/PHP/Laravel triple — we would be the QA function. The failure mode that matters is silent: a Nova minor bump leaves the menu rendering while groups flatten or resources vanish, surfacing as an operator ticket six weeks later. If we proceed, pin the exact version (0.1.0, no caret), budget a mandatory half-day spike on a throwaway branch (expect PHP 8.x deprecations and asset-publishing confusion — nova:publish is the usual "installed but does nothing" cause), and back it with a render smoke test asserting group headings appear. Honestly, the package is a better tutorial than a dependency: read it once (~an hour), learn where the sidebar hooks live, then write our own — and pin the decision (fork with a named owner, or reimplement), not just the version. A floating Composer dependency with no owner is the one outcome with no good ending.