Project Overview
Laravel Social Follow is an open-source package that provides a complete, ready-to-integrate solution for managing social "follow" relationships within Laravel applications. It abstracts the complexity of database relationships and business logic into a simple, fluent API, allowing developers to add rich social features to their apps in minutes instead of hours.
The package was built to be highly flexible, supporting any Eloquent model (User, Page, Team, etc.), and is designed for performance and ease of use.
Problem & Solution
Modern applications often require social features where users can follow entities to subscribe to their activity. Manually implementing this requires designing database migrations, writing complex model relationships, and creating controllers for follow actions. This package solves that by offering a standardized, well-tested, and efficient solution that can be installed via Composer and configured with a few simple commands.
Key Features & Implementation
Model-Agnostic Design: Allows any model (User, Page, etc.) to both follow and be followed.
Intuitive API: Simple methods like
$user->follow(),$user->unfollow(), and$user->isFollowing().Eager Relationship Loading: Utilizes Laravel's built-in relationships for optimal query performance.
Pagination Support: Easily paginate large lists of followers or followed models.
Event-Driven: Dispatches Laravel events on follow/unfollow, enabling easy extension for notifications or analytics.
Technical Highlights: The package leverages Laravel's Polymorphic Relationships to achieve its model-agnostic functionality. It includes artisan commands for installation, comprehensive configuration files, and detailed facades for static calling.
Repository
The source code, full documentation, installation guide, and contribution guidelines are available on GitHub:
https://github.com/ultratechinnovations/laravel-social-follow