In this episode, we're kicking things off by setting up a practical example to explore Eloquent's has one of many relationship feature in Laravel. The scenario we're using is a simple forum setup: we've got users, discussions, and posts. Think of each discussion kind of like a thread, and each post as a reply within a discussion.
We start by setting up our database tables and models for users, discussions, and posts. Most of the episode is dedicated to quickly scaffolding out the models and migrations, keeping things intentionally simple so we can focus on the relationships later. Once the migrations are in place, we use Tinker and some manual database seeding to create a few fake users, discussions, and posts. We pay particular attention to the timestamps of the posts so we can later easily determine which was the latest one in each discussion.
From there, we make a very basic UI in Blade to list all the discussions. For now, it just displays the discussion title, but we're prepping things so that, in the next episode, we can show details about the latest post (like who made it and when).
If you're after a fully-featured forum, we mention there's a bigger course available, but here we're just using this setup as a learning sandbox. In the next episode, we'll dive into defining the has one of many Eloquent relationship and use it to show the latest post for each discussion. Stay tuned!