In this episode, we dive into creating and listing topics for our discussion forum. Topics are basically categories like "Inertia," "Laravel," or "General Discussions" that help organize where discussions should go. We build out the underlying structure for our topics, starting with a migration and a model to store each topic's name and a unique slug.
Once the basic database is set up, we manually add a few example topics to the table so we can see what they look like right away. Next, we make sure topics are available everywhere in our app by sharing them as global data in our middleware.
To keep our code clean and organized, we use Laravel's API resources to define exactly how our topic data is returned to the frontend—only including properties like ID, name, and slug, which we actually need. We tweak the API resource so our frontend gets a tidy array rather than a wrapped response, making it super easy to loop through topics.
On the frontend, we put our topics into a select dropdown, so users can pick their topic of choice. For better code reuse and style consistency, we build a custom select component (using Tailwind for styling) instead of using the default HTML select. We also make sure to add an accessible label for the dropdown that’s screen-reader-friendly, keeping our app accessible without cluttering up the UI.
By the end of this episode, we've successfully set up a way to create and list topics as a dropdown filter, and structured things so these topics are ready to use in other parts of our app too.