Welcome to the course! In this first episode, we kick things off by introducing what you'll learn and demoing the forum app that we'll build together. The stack we're using is Laravel for the backend and Vue (with Inertia.js) on the frontend.
I walk you through the main features of the forum, starting with how it looks for a logged-out user, and then logging in to see the changes. You get to see the discussion creation process, including Markdown support (and its handy shortcut buttons), how to mention users with @username, and how you can edit your username from your profile. We'll also see how persistent the discussion form is even while you browse around the app.
There's a demo of replying to discussions, editing and deleting posts, and how pagination and scrolling work, even in tricky cases. We cover the ability to mark answers as the "best answer" (marking topics as solved), and using various filters: unsolved, solved, no replies, your own discussions, those you participate in, and where you've been mentioned. There's also search and topic filtering.
Throughout, I highlight some of the advanced but hidden logic we'll cover—like keeping track of post positions with pagination, making sure only authorized users see the right actions, and how those state changes are handled on both the backend and frontend. We wrap up by talking about why building forums is such a great learning experience, and tease what we'll do next. In the next episode, we'll get our app set up and start building!