Introducing Volet: A Laravel Package for User Feedback

In the spirit of building lightweight and efficient solutions, I've developed Volet, a Laravel package designed to seamlessly integrate a user feedback widget into your app. Just like the simple like system we explored earlier, Volet aims to be straightforward yet flexible.

What is Volet?

Volet is a small panel (or "volet" in French 🇫🇷) that opens from the bottom corner of your site when the user clicks a floating button.

Inside this panel, you can provide users with tools to share feedback, report bugs, or even suggest new features.

Think of it like a self-hosted Intercom — but much simpler, and totally under your control.

Installation

Getting started is super quick:

composer require mydnic/volet
php artisan vendor:publish --tag=volet-assets --force
php artisan vendor:publish --tag=volet-migrations
php artisan migrate

And then just drop this in your Blade views:

<head>
...
@voletStyles
</head>

<body>
...
@volet
</body>

Volet will now appear on your site 🎉

Built-In Feedback Feature

Out of the box, Volet comes with a feedback message system. Users can submit their thoughts and pick from categories like:

  • General Feedback 😃
  • Improvement Ideas 💡
  • Bug Reports 🐞

You can customize all of this through the VoletServiceProvider, including the label, icon, and categories.

Extensible with Features 🔌

Here’s where it gets fun: Volet is built to be extensible. You can register your own features — like a chatbot, a roadmap, or anything you can build as a web component (Vue works great 😉). Just create a class that extends BaseFeature, and you're good to go.

Even better: you can install community features too!

For example:

👉 FeatureBoard (mydnic/volet-feature-board): Adds a feature request board to Volet. Users can submit ideas and upvote suggestions from others — just like on popular SaaS platforms.

More features will come as I (and hopefully others) build them. The idea is to keep the core clean and let developers extend it how they want.

Conclusion

Volet is a lightweight, flexible widget to collect user feedback, built with Laravel and Vue. It’s simple to install, easy to extend, and fun to play with 😄

Check it out on GitHub: 👉 https://github.com/mydnic/volet

Let me know what features you would love to see!