Progress Report: April 2025

Hey there, April has gone by - wow, that was fast. This month, a lot of our energy went into preparing the Backpack v7 release, includi...

Hey there,

April has gone by - wow, that was fast. This month, a lot of our energy went into preparing the Backpack v7 release, including upgrading our own website to the latest Laravel version (from a shamefully old one, to be honest). We’re nearly there with the release - Pedro and I will be working on this exclusively in the next month, to wrap it up. Hopefully by next time I write this report - I'll have the news we're all hoping for. In the meantime, here’s what we’ve been up to:

Maintenance

To list a few:

• 6 bug fixes in Backpack\CRUD
• 2 bug fixes in Backpack\PRO
• at least 1 bug fix in ALL other packages

Why changes in all our packages? Because we've removed unpkg links from all our packages. If you've had trouble with unpkg last month, a composer update should fix it now. If you're unfamiliar with the issue, the TLDR is that unpkg has become wildly unreliable, so we had to change all our package to use a different CDN. Gotta admit, this was a wild one - so glad it's over!

Support

Support has run smoothly - with Jorge and Karan answering your problems and questions. We’re happy to see more and more of you using the Docs AI inside our documentation. If you haven’t used it yet, here’s a quick guide on how to use Backpack Docs AI.

In case you're wondering how Backpack fares inside Cursor / Windsurf / ClineAI... well... spectacularly well. And it's only going to get better. In general, because Backpack has been around for so long, and it's syntax hasn't changed much... agentic code editors will work VERY well with Backpack. Don't believe me? Try it out.

Heads-up:

• Docs AI won’t remain available to all paying users forever. If you want to try it, now’s the time.
• In the near future, we plan to roll back the "human support" on Github, in favor of a Premium Support package; the truth is, our team spends too much time on Github, and we want to direct those resources towards creating some super-cool add-ons, that I'm sure you'll enjoy; this will be an opportunity for someone from the community to step up and answer other likeminded individuals - if you love Backpack as much as we do, click "watch" on our community forum and help people out!

Content

We've published four new articles this month:

• Laravel Not Reading .env? Here’s The Right Way to Manage Your App Settings - by Pankaj Ramesh Vasnani
• How to Build SaaS Using Backpack for Laravel - by Karan Datwani
• Why You Should Link Your CRUDs (And How to Do It with Backpack) - by Karan Datwani
• How to Build Laravel Forms with Validation in 2025 - by Karan Datwani

Let us know what you think in the comments. Especially the the first one - it's Pankaj's first article on our blog - let's congratulate him!

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That’s it for April. Thanks again for using Backpack, supporting the project, and helping us make it better every month.

Until next time,
Tabacitu & The Backpack Team