Categories

What it is

A category is a per-user grouping for goals (Category belongsTo User, Category hasMany Goal). Categories are never shared across users; each one is scoped to the account that created it. There is no setting to turn categories on or off, they're a standard part of the goal model.

Default categories on registration

When a new user registers, the Registered event fires and the GenerateDefaultUserCategories listener creates ten default categories for that user, each with a name, a color, and a Lucide icon name:

Health & Fitness, Career & Work, Finance & Money, Learning & Education, Personal Development, Relationships & Social, Hobbies & Creativity, Home & Lifestyle, Travel & Adventure, Wellness & Mental Health.

These are just a starting point: the user can rename, delete, or add their own categories afterward like any other category they own.

Slug and order (CategoryObserver)

Category uses the Sluggable trait (cviebrock/laravel-sluggable), configured to derive the slug from name. Sluggable hooks into the model's saving event, which fires before creating, so by the time CategoryObserver::creating() runs, a slug is normally already set. The observer still guards for the case where one isn't: if slug is empty, it generates one from name via Str::slug().

The observer also assigns display order on creation: if no order is given and the category has a user_id, order is set to (the user's current highest category order) + 1. This keeps newly created categories appended at the end of the user's list rather than defaulting to 0.

Colors and icons

Each category stores a color (hex string, used for visual tagging) and an icon (a Lucide icon name, matching how goals reference their own icon). Both are plain, freeform fields set through the category form; there's no fixed palette or icon set enforced server-side.

How to use it

• Categories are managed from the Categories pages (CategoryController): list, create, edit, delete, each scoped to the authenticated user via policy checks.
• A goal optionally belongs to one category (category_id, nullable, set null on category delete rather than cascading), assigned from the goal's own create/edit form.
• On the goals list, filtering by category happens client-side: the page loads the user's full goal list, and picking a category in the filter (backed by the ?category= query parameter, which also seeds the initial selection) narrows what's shown without a new request to the server.