In this episode, we're improving our discussion list by adding info about the most recent reply for each discussion. Having this feature makes it super easy for users to spot the latest activity at a glance and quickly jump into the conversation.
To get started, we introduce a new relationship on our Discussion
model so we can easily access the latest post associated with that discussion. We use Laravel's convenient latestOfMany
relationship (which is relatively new), instead of just hasOne
, so that we always get the most recent post instead of just the first one.
Once that's on the backend, we tweak the frontend to show the username and timestamp of the last reply in a nice, readable format. We also pay attention to eagers loading all related data to avoid extra database queries. Then, we improve the way we handle dates and times by wrapping them in semantic <time>
HTML elements, which is not a huge visual change but does make our markup more accurate and accessible.
By the end, you'll see the "Last post by X at Y" info in your discussion index, nicely styled, and in a way that's easy to scan and click through to dive right into the latest conversation.