I just do not understand why this needs to be so complex, why cant u just add a isAdmin field, default it to false, if u want to exclude admins from lists, User::where('isAdmin','!=','true');

You can use contexts for this. To cut this short, just check this out http://culttt.com/2014/03/31/multi-tenancy-laravel-4/. Though I don't think this is the best implementation of this concept, still can be useful and point you in the right direction.

thanks jarek,

although its not quite what I'm after, there are a few queues i can take from it.

if it was an app just for me i wouldn't worry about just adding an is_admin db field and using this in every query.

the problem is hopefully the system will be used by plugin developers just like wordpress is, and i want to make it as simple for them as possible, while also making sure a simple thing like listing users excludes admins without the plugin author explicitly stating it from a security point of view.

User::where('isAdmin','!=','true');

would work fine, but i want admins to be listed on a "explicitly requested" basis and not during normal user calls.

thinking about it this way is there a way within the model to always add a where clause to any call to the model?

is there like a build query event or something like that?