Progress Report - December 2023

Ho ho ho! 🎅 Hope you enjoyed your holidays, if you celebrate them! Most of us here do, so it's been an "light" month for tea...

Ho ho ho! 🎅 Hope you enjoyed your holidays, if you celebrate them! Most of us here do, so it's been an "light" month for team Backpack. We've held up to our promises though, and Santa has brought you some small features, that will fix some papercuts. But first:

Maintenance

• CRUD - 3 bug fixes
• PRO - 2 bug fixes
• a few small fixes to our other packages

You'll notice we've been closing fewer bugs in the past few months. That's not because we've been lazy (hell no). It's because we've had fewer and fewer reported bugs... that were worth fixing. It's because Backpack v6 has become more and more mature. That is such a great thing to witness!

New Features

Easily open column links in another tab - linkTarget()

In October we launched linkTo('route.name'), to easily add links to any route you want. Then in November we added linkToShow(). Now in December, Antonio has just finished adding linkTarget() which allows you to easily open that page in a new tab:

CRUD::column('category')->linkToShow()->linkTarget('_blank');

You can see more about this in the docs.

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Another access method - allowAccessOnlyTo()

As mentioned last month too, Backpack comes with its own way to allow/deny access to operations. Last month, we added CRUD::denyAllAccess(). Starting this month, you can also do this in your CrudController::setup():

// ProductCrudController
public function setup() {
    CRUD::allowAccessOnlyTo('list'); // or
    CRUD::allowAccessOnlyTo(['list', 'delete']);
}

This is a small quality-of-live improvement for an often-needed use case in access. Thanks to Antonio for creating it!

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Tabler Theme Login - button to show/hide the password

This idea came as a PR from Selim Gormus - he needed a way for the user to show/hide the password on login, to make sure there are no typos. Antonio and Karan jumped on it and tada... now we all have it! You can just toggle a config in your configs/backapck/theme-tabler.php:

        /**
         * When true, the password input will have a toggle button to show/hide the password.
         */
        'showPasswordVisibilityToggler' => false,

And you'll have it:

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What have we accomplished in 2023?

In addition to all the features we've launched... we've actually ticked our goal for 2023, which was to develop processes that actually work for our team, so that nothing falls through the cracks and we do what we have to do to keep our clients happy.

We're proud to tell you that our team is working better than ever now: everybody knows what they're doing, has KPIs and goals and we not only have maintenance covered, but we can now start creating new things:

• support is fully covered by Jorge and Karan now;
• content is provided by Karan, with help from Tabacitu (both here on our blog and on Twitter);
• our bug backlog is steadily going down thanks to Pedro;
• minor features and add-ons are pushed by Antonio and Pedro;
• new products are being developed by Tabacitu;

We're no longer racing to do stuff. We're no longer "figuring things out". We know who does what, and how. If you've been part of a growing company, you know how that moment feels like, and how important it is for a small company. I'm super-grateful for this team, and the efforts everyone in it has been making for us to build, maintain and grow Backpack 🙏 Can't wait to see what we can accomplish together next year!

What's the plan for 2024?

In the past 2 months we've asked both our free and paying customers what they want and we have a big list of TODOs from them. Please vote or suggest here too. We've processed all our surveys, suggestions and answers, and have decided on our next big things. We have a roadmap and we're following it!

Our priorities in Q1 2024 will be to:

• keep up the good work with support and content (we heard you!);
• close most small issues in our backlog that are holding us down;
• develop and launch the most-requested features to the current version (CalendarOperation, select2_from_api, GridOperation, KanBanOperation, ExportOperation);
• release a new version in March 2023, to push things forward, without introducing too many breaking changes;
• release a new product, that brings "live components" to Backpack; these islands of interactivity will allow us to create long-term solutions to some long-requested features (like CRUD in CRUD); plus, we'll be able to slowly (or suddenly) modernize our admin panels, without having to introduce 5 new technologies in our stack; in fact... you won't need to learn much else than PHP and a new system; we've been holding off about this, but we are SUPER excited; we love it already, and are pretty sure you will too; we'll give access to Unlimited buyers as soon as we have it, then slowly roll it to more people when it's more mature; follow me on Twitter to keep you posted on this;

That's it from us. I hope 2024 will be as full and exciting for you... as it seems will be for us. Thanks for using Backpack. We love doing this for you.

Cheers!