So I am attempting to create a basic CMS in Laravel as a sort of pet project. I am coming from a wordpress background, and so I tend to think in terms of post types. Because of this, I tend to think of Models as sort of post types. In my base CMS I have a model for pages, articles, categories, tags, and various other things. Some models I don't want in the dashboard nav, and some I do, so inside the Models.php file I added a variable called $in_dash, with a function to return this variable.

protected $in_dash;
    protected $dash_labels;

    public function get_dash() {
        return $this->in_dash;
    }

    public function get_labels() {
        return $this->dash_labels;
    }

Then inside my newly created models I have a __construct function that generates their ability to be in the dash and labels:

public function __construct() {
        $this->in_dash = true;
        $this->dash_labels = array(
            'label' => 'Articles',
            'slug' => 'articles',
            'add' => 'Add New',
            'view' => 'View All'
        );
    }

To get this data into my dashboard, I pieced together this function in a service provider that passes all the 'active' models into a nav view in the dashboard. It scans my models directory and returns any model found. Then creates a new instance and runs get_dash() and then ger_labels() if that is true. An array of dash labels is passed into the view. I have another function in there to check a $type variable that doesn't really apply to my thread. It just makes sure any route variable used in dash matches a model slug.

public function boot()
    {
        view()->composer('dashboard.partials.nav', function($view) {
            $dash_items = [];
            $files = scandir(app_path() . '\Models');
            $namespace = 'App';

            foreach($files as $file) {
                //skip current and parent folder entries and non-php files
                if ($file == '.' || $file == '..') continue;
                $file = str_replace('.php', '', $file);
                $model = '\\' . $namespace . '\\Models\\' . $file;
                $model = new $model();
                if ($model->get_dash()) {
                    if ($model->get_labels()) {
                        $dash_items[] = $model->get_labels();
                    }
                    else {
                        $dash_items[] = $file;
                    }
                }
            }

            if ($view->type) {
                $pass = false;

                foreach ($dash_items as $item) {
                    if (is_array($item)) {
                        if ($view->type == $item['slug']) {
                            $pass = true;
                        }
                    }
                    else {
                        if ($view->type == $item) {
                            $pass = true;
                        }
                    }
                }

                if ($pass == false) {
                    dd('false');
                }
            }

            $view->with('nav_items', $dash_items);
        });
    }

I guess I don't have any questions. This just feels a little... strange to me. I am fairly new to PHP dev and very new to Laravel, so if there is a better way to do this, I'd love to know. I know I can hard code my models into my dashboard, but part of the CMS is the ability to create new post type models inside the dashboard, so I need a programmatic way to display them.