In this episode, we dig into how discussion posts are going to be structured and handled in our app. Instead of cramming the first post inside the discussion itself, we're keeping all posts—including the original one—together in a separate posts table. That means every reply, including the one that kicks off a discussion, is just a regular post. This setup makes it way easier to deal with posts independently and keeps our relationships nice and clean!
We start by setting up our Post model along with its migration. We'll add all the important fields, like user_id (nullable, so posts can stick around even if the user deletes their account), discussion_id, and a nifty parent_id for replies. The parent_id is where things get interesting—it lets us easily add support for nested replies down the line. If it's null, it's the original post; otherwise, it points to the post it's replying to.
With the database structure done, we move on to model relationships in Laravel. We link up discussions so they can have many posts, and we also add a way to quickly grab the original/first post. On the Post model, we add relationships back to the Discussion and User models.
To wrap up, we manually create a couple of example posts, including one as a reply, to show how everything fits together. By the end of this session, we've got a solid setup for handling posts and replies in our discussions, and we're ready to move on to displaying them in the UI!