Nova Wizard Laravel Package

Product Decisions This Supports

• Build vs. buy for internal admin tooling. If the team already runs Laravel Nova, zareismail/nova-wizard is a drop-in way to split an unwieldy resource form into guided steps (onboarding, imports, setup assistants, guided resource creation) without commissioning custom Vue work. The decision to make is “small spike + possible fork” versus “custom build,” not “adopt a workflow platform.”
• Back-office vs. customer-facing scoping. This package is an internal admin productivity layer only. It helps PMs draw a clean line: multi-step operations flows can live in Nova cheaply; anything customer-facing, compliance-sensitive, or revenue-critical needs a different investment.
• Roadmap sequencing and unblocking ops. A low-effort admin wizard can relieve operations teams now (fewer form errors, faster training, shorter completion time) without pulling product engineering into a broader workflow-engine initiative. Position it as an accelerator, not a strategic bet.
• Prototype validation before committing. Use it to test a hypothesis — “do step-based admin forms improve completion rates or reduce operator error?” — on one representative resource, with real admin users, before funding a custom build.
• Risk-based adoption as a product decision. With 14 stars, zero dependents, a single maintainer, and a last release of August 2023, adoption is as much a maintenance-risk call as a feature call. That pushes the decision toward a timeboxed spike with a documented fork/replacement plan rather than long-term dependency.
• Not supported: customer-facing flows, compliance workflows, or multi-team platform primitives. If a decision hinges on SLAs, security responsiveness, or broad adoption, this package does not help you make it.

When to Consider This Package

Consider it when:

• You are already standardized on Laravel Nova and want a lightweight, internal-only wizard UI — this package is meaningless outside Nova.
• The workflow is low criticality and low blast radius: internal onboarding, data entry, setup assistants, guided resource creation.
• You can pin Nova/Laravel/PHP versions, smoke-test after every upgrade, and accept ownership of fixes or a maintained fork.
• You need a prototype or short-lived admin flow where speed beats ecosystem health.
• A two-step POC on one existing create form would surface the real questions (state handling, validation timing, file uploads, refresh behavior) in a day or two of engineering time.

Look elsewhere when:

• The workflow is customer-facing, compliance-sensitive, or business-critical, or needs an SLA or security responsiveness.
• You are not on Nova, or you are on the newest Nova major (a 2023-era tool is plausibly Nova 4-only; assume forking on Nova 5).
• You need per-step server-side state or conditional branching across steps — the heavier, fork-prone path.
• You want a maintained form/wizard framework with real community signals, CI, tests, and issue triage.

Gating questions before any commitment: Which Nova/Laravel/PHP versions does composer.json constrain? Is submission a single POST at the end or per-step? Is validation enforced server-side? Is wizard state client-only, session, or persisted draft? Does a committed dist/ exist, or must you build from source? What is the maintainer’s issue response pattern, and is a fork acceptable?

How to Pitch It (Stakeholders)

Executive summary. zareismail/nova-wizard is an MIT-licensed Nova add-on that can speed up internal admin wizards — useful for low-risk operational tooling, but not a strategic dependency. The cost is licensing-free; the real cost is ownership. Recommend a small, timeboxed engineering spike with an explicit fork/maintenance plan, measured against admin task completion and error rates. Do not route customer-facing or regulated workflows through it.

Engineering summary. It is a presentation/navigation layer over Nova’s existing field system — store()/update(), policies, and validation stay where they always were. Integration is small: Composer install, optional tool registration, asset publishing, and a base wizard class returning standard Nova fields per step. The primary constraint is ecosystem health, not complexity: 14 stars, zero dependents, single maintainer, last release August 2023. Evaluate against your Nova version first, prefer single-POST client-only submission, enforce the full ruleset server-side in a FormRequest, do transactional writes for multi-model flows, and pin versions in composer.lock. Budget for compatibility testing on every Nova/Laravel/PHP upgrade and a likely fork if the flow earns its keep.

Recommendation. Approve only as a feature-flagged, timeboxed spike — one existing create form rebuilt as a two-step wizard, UAT’d with actual admin users, with a named internal owner, a short runbook, and a documented rollback. Do not make it a platform dependency. The first Nova major upgrade is the decision point: patch forward, fork, or replace.