Laravel Eloquent, group by month/year

You'll need to overwrite Eloquent model's getCastType() method in your model class:

protected function getCastType($key) {
  if ($key == 'value' && !empty($this->type)) {
    return $this->type;
  } else {
    return parent::getCastType($key);
  }
}

You'll also need to add value to $this->casts so that Eloquent recognizes that field as castable. You can put the default cast there that will be used if you didn't set type.

Update:

The above works perfectly when reading data from the database. When writing data, you have to make sure that type is set before value. There are 2 options:

1. Always pass an array of attributes where type key comes before value key - at the moment model's fill() method respects the order of keys when processing data, but it's not future-proof.

2. Explicitely set type attribute before setting other attributes. It can be easily done with the following code:

   $model == (new Model(['type' => $data['type']))->fill($data)->save();
   

If I understand correctly, you'd like to fetch a list of Content objects together with their children Content objects, correct?

Easiest way to do that is to create a parent-child relation in your Eloquent Content model and then use that to load parents with children:

<?php
class Content extends Model {
  public function children() {
    //this defines a relation one-to-many using parent_id field as the foreign key
    return $this->hasMany(Content::class, 'parent_id'); 
  }

  public function parent() {
    return $this->belongsTo(Content::class, 'parent_id'); 
  }

  public function section() {
    return $this->belongsTo(Section::class);
  }
}

Then, if you want to list Content objects their Section together with with their children and their sections, you can fetch the data like that:

$contents = Content::with(['children', 'section', 'children.section'])->whereNull('parent_id')->get();

$contents will contain a collection of all Content objects that have no parent. Each of the objects will have a $content->children attribute that holds a collection of all children Content objects. All children objects will also hold a reference to their parent in $childContent->parent. Both parents and children will have their corresponding section in ->section attribute.

If you wanted to display some Content hierarchy now in your Blade template, you can pass the $contents variable to the view and do the following:

<ul>
@foreach($contents as $content)
  <li>{{$content->title}}</li>
  @if($content->children->count() > 0)
    <ul>
      @foreach($content->children as $childContent)
        <li>{{$childContent->title}}</li>
      @endforeach
   </ul>
  @endif
@endforeach
</ul>  

I noticed that you have a sequence field in your model. I assue that you want content to be sorted by that field. In this case you'll need modify the way you fetch the data:

$contents = Content::with(['children' => function($builder) {
  $builder->orderBy('sequence', 'desc');
}, 'section', 'children.section'])->whereNull('parent_id')->get();