Progress Report - December 2024

This was a slower month at Backpack HQ. We had burned out our tires last month with the Black Friday rush and security fixes, so it was...

Cristian Tabacitu

Published on 31 December 2024 in News

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This was a slower month at Backpack HQ. We had burned out our tires last month with the Black Friday rush and security fixes, so it was a nice change of pace to have the team work at a standard pace - especially with the holidays and everything.

Hope you enjoyed your holidays too - Happy New Year, from the Backpack team! We're excited about 2025 - we have a lot of things in progress for you. It looks like 2025 will be the year where we get a lot closer to my initial vision for Backpack 🤞 We're already an excellent all-in-one for your admin panel needs, but in 2025... we will reach an entirely different level in terms of feature-completeness, flexibility and easy-of-use. All without many breaking changes - that's the tricky part!

Maintenance

Pedro, Jorge, community members Jesper Noordsij and Toms Binde have pushed more fixes:

• CRUD - 10 bug fixes;
• PRO - 2 bug fixes;
• theme-tabler - 2 bug fixes;
• a few other fixes to our other free packages;

Support

It's been getting easier and easier for Jorge and Karan to answer your questions on the Backpack Community Forum, thanks to our AI-powered BackpackBot. Even when it's not exactly right, the AI has been super-useful in pointing users in a right direction. And considering the fact the AI can answer in 1 minute rather than 1 day... this is a HUGE improvement.

How was your experience with our Backpack Bot? Good or bad, let us know in the comments below 👇🏻

New Content

New articles on our blog in November:

• How to compare two CRUD entities, by Karan Datwani;
• List and preview data from other sources like APIs, by Karan Datwani;
• Easy HTTPS Setup with Sail and FrankenPHP, by Kidd Tang;
• How to setup a nested CRUD, by Karan Datwani;

We're very happy to feature articles by Kidd Tang in the past few months. If you also want to write articles about Backpack/Laravel and get featured on our blog, please let us know.

If you haven't already, subscribe to our blog article digest to get these articles as soon as they're out. We're active on Twitter too - follow us for a daily dose of Laravel and PHP tips & tricks.

What's the plan for 2025?

As mentioned, we have big plans for 2025. Without revealing too much of the surprises:

• in Q1 we will release Backpack v7, which includes important fixes to parts of Backpack that have caused frustration in the past (Basset, uploaders); there will be breaking changes, but small ones;
• in Q1, we will also bump our prices (we have to, due to inflation) and add some bigger plans for customers with more specific needs (a plan with Premium Support and a plan with X hours of coding included); please email me if you're interested in that, you could help us craft a better plan;
• in Q2 we will release some premium add-ons that will make our Everything bundle an even better deal; it's incredible to me how much value we offer with that;
• in Q3 we will heavily improve DevTools, to make it even easier to generate admin panels;
• in Q4 we will launch more premium add-ons and start working on Backpack v8;

Of course, in addition to the above we will be spending a lot of time maintaining Backpack, building minor features you need and all around contributing to our great community. Thanks again for being part of this journey, and helping us build our dream product!

Quick Ask

If you haven't given us a star on Github, please spare 5 seconds and give us one. It might help more people discover our project - and the more people use Backpack, the better for everyone. Of course, you can also tell a friend and get rewards 😉

Thanks for using Backpack. We love doing this for you.

Here's to a GREAT 2025 - cheers! 🍷