Progress Report - Dec 2022

It's been a crazy month here at Backpack. We've been working in more areas than ever (v5, v6, marketing, design, legal) but I won't bor...

It's been a crazy month here at Backpack. We've been working in more areas than ever (v5, v6, marketing, design, legal) but I won't bore you with the details... nor will I boast about things that aren't ready yet. Instead of focusing on what we started, I'm just going to mention what we got done this month. Because we've got plenty of that too:

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Maintenance

Since our last progress report, we've pushed to:

• CRUD: 19 bug fixes (and unit tests... lots of lots of unit tests);
• PRO: 3 bug fixes + 1 feature (see below)
• DevTools: 1 bug fix + 1 feature (see below)
• EditableColumns: 1 bug fix

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New Features

New google_map field in PRO

Kudos to Mohamed Said for starting this, and Pedro Martins and Jorge Castro for finishing and polishing it. Thanks a lot, guys 🙏

Using this new google_map field type you can help your admins easily input latitude, longitude (and maybe even address) by searching then moving a marker on the map. It really is that simple from their point of view, but behind the scenes... not that easy 😀 Here's how it looks and works:

For more info, head over to the google_map field docs.

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New functionality in DevTools: create page

We've had a command-line solution to create a page for a few weeks, so it was time to make it even easier, by adding a simple interface for it inside DevTools too. And here it is, in all its beauty (kudos to Antonio Almeida for this):

This will quickly create a route, controller and blade file, for you to do... whatever you want. A completely custom page, that still uses the Backpack layout. So you can copy-paste HTML components from backstrap.net and it'll look good too 😉

This completes our plans for DevTool for this year... DevTools can now create or override all the files that are needed for medium-complexity projects. We still plan add to features to it (eg. editing models... we heard you!) but only next year, after we launch Backpack v6.

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Community

Gitter is so last year!

We're phasing out Gitter. What's Gitter, you ask? Well it's a chatroom where some of our community has gathered for the past 4-5 years. It's appeared naturally thanks to Owen Melbourne (hey!) and over 1100 members have visited it, but in the recent years... it's just become a place where people ask for help with coding. This is a bit sad, because a chatroom is not built to handle Q&A:

• at this scale, asking and answering q&a becomes difficult and frustrating;
• the answers are not searchable, so the same questions have been answered again and again;

This has resulted in a bad experience when asking for help... because our team's and community's help efforts were being spread out between StackOverflow, Github and Gitter. And Gitter users received the worst experience of all. No mas! 😅 We've decided to open a special forum, where people can ask for help... and it's powered by Github Discussions. Check out the brand-new...

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Backpack's Community Forum

It's built into Github, so you don't need to create a different account. It's got notifications, it's got threads, it's got image support, it's got marking answers as the good one (a la StackOverflow), it's got everything we need, if we do it right! We've moved all conversations from other repos here... so from now on... this is THE place where we can interact with each other, talk about stuff, ask for help, post announcements, show off what we've done, everything.

If you've enjoyed spending time on Gitter, and want to interact more with our team and developers just like you, please give our Community Forum a chance too. If you've wondered where to post a question... here's your answer 😀 I'm excited about what the community will do with this new forum (and a bit scared 😅).

For a long long time, I've wanted to interact more with the people that used Backpack... Gitter wasn't a proper medium for that, and I have a good feeling about this. Join us in our Community Forum and let's get to know each other better, interact better, and hopefully build better software, partnerships or friendships. Start by saying hi here.

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Going to Laracon Lisbon?

Our core team members, Pedro and Antonio will be there too! Reply to this article and let us know or... you know... maybe post in our brand-new Community Forum?... Just sayin' 🤷‍♂️

Thanks for using Backpack. We love doing this for you. I hope you had some wonderful holidays, and you're as excited about the new year as we are. Bright times ahead!

Cheers!