Progress Report - April 2022

Good news! Now that Backpack v5 is launched, polished and stable, we can dedicate more time to finer details. To gradually improve ever...

Cristian Tabacitu

Published on 12 May 2022 in News

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Good news! Now that Backpack v5 is launched, polished and stable, we can dedicate more time to finer details. To gradually improve every aspect of what we offer.

So, to keep you guys up-to-date and keep us accountable, we’ve decided to write a short summary every month, listing the things we’ve worked on. This should give you a TLDR on what has happened inside our organisation, the chance to give feedback early and maybe even use features before they’re out. Here we go.

In April 2022, in addition to regular maintenance and bug fixing:

1. For all devs - We’ve done a security audit, discovered and fixed a medium-severity security issue. You should have already been emailed about this one, because… you’re subscribed to our security newsletter. Right? Right?! 😀 👀 In any case, we’ll also write a blog post about it shortly.

2. For all devs - We’ve started working on Backpack v5.1 (free, non-breaking update). The biggest new feature in it will be a nifty API to easily work with fields in JavaScript. This will not only allow us to easily show/hide fields, but also enable/disable, require/unrequire, create live fields like a “slug” or “total” and… pretty much anything custom, really. We expect to have it launched in May 2022 - so if you have thoughts or feedback on it, please hurry up.

3. For all devs - We’ve started working on Livewire components. This is a huuuge endeavour, still pretty early, but it looks very very promising. We’ve been using Livewire for a while now in our admin panels, and we think it’s about time we add components that use it - we think you’ll love it too. And the best part? It looks like we can add them gradually, as alternatives to the jQuery ones. By the end of the year, we expect you’ll be able to do everything you can right now in Backpack… with zero jQuery. Exciting times!

4. For Unlimited buyers - We’re in the polishing stage of a new addon for you. One that will allow you to make some columns in the List table editable - to allow the admin to flip a switch or quickly edit something right then-and-there, in the table view. Antonio is spearheading this effort. Reach out by email if you want to beta-test it.

5. We’ve commissioned and gotten a new logo (preview on twitter.com/tabacitu). This is just the first step in our mission this year to modernize the Backpack brand - but also how our admin panels look & feel. The process has officially started, we have people working on it and there’s no turning back. Super-excited about this.

6. We’ve gotten a new team member, Alexandra - she’ll be helping us organize a lot of the non-technical aspects of running Backpack, things we’ve been neglecting so far - our design, editorial and marketing endeavours. That’s right, for the first time ever, we’ll have someone actually responsible for our blog, for us creating more learning content for you. We’ll start small, but this time… we have high hopes we’ll actually keep doing it!

7. We’re looking for new team members, to help us maintain Backpack, build new features, add-ons and polish our website. So if you’re a freelancer, love Backpack and have 10-20h available per week, please email [email protected]. Tell me a little about yourself, show what you’ve built using Backpack and ask about our new positions. Let’s see if we’re a good match.

That’s all the bigger stuff. If you like/dislike this initiative, please let us know by commenting below. If you want to get these monthly reports by email, please subscribe to the blog article digest.

Thanks for using Backpack!