Progress Report: January 2024

Happy new year, everyone! This is our first report of 2024, and we can clearly say... this year has started at full speed. A lot more i...

Happy new year, everyone! This is our first report of 2024, and we can clearly say... this year has started at full speed. A lot more issues came up this month, but our support & patch teams have done a great job dealing with them. We've also taken the time to polish and launch the feature we had planned for this month. So let's get into it:

Maintenance

• CRUD - 9 bug fixes, 2 big optimizations
• PRO - 3 bug fixes, 2 new features
• Editable-Columns - 2 bug fixes
• a few other fixes to our other packages

New Features

Custom Views for the List Operation

As an admin, you sometimes need different "views" or "lenses" through which to look at your entries. For example:

• you will need a complete exhaustive Products list;
• but you might also need a Best sold products list;
• and you might also need a Last month products for accounting list;

Thanks to Antonio, PRO users have an easy way to do that now. In addition to the ListOperation, you can use the CustomViewsOperation to define additional "views". And inside that view... the world is your oyster. Use additional columns/filters... reorder stuff... remove stuff... it's as easy to use as the default ListOperation view itself:

We're super-happy to have this, because it'll be helpful to us. We hope you find it helpful as well! You can see more about this feature in the docs.

The Slug Field Got a Huge Upgrade

I'm happy to mention this, because the slug field is a feature many people don't know we even have! Its goal is simple: turn another input into a slug, in realtime. And for that it uses our CrudField JS API (another feature few people know about).

Well... thanks to Pedro, our slug field just got a HUGE upgrade. After we were notified it doesn't properly sluggify German characters, we decided to introduce a slugging library to it, which adds a bunch more features and customzations. So from a simple field... it has become quite a powerful one - you can easily customize HOW the slugging is happening. Pretty cool stuff.

For more info, please see the docs.

Use Database Transactions on Create & Update

Pedro has just pushed a silent feature that will help prevent problems with complex Eloquent Models. Inside your config/backpack/base.php config file you can now set useDatabaseTransactions to true and it will do just that... use DB transactions during the CreateOperation and UpdateOperation. That means if it fails... it all fails. That prevents a scenario where your primary entry gets saved correctly, but then relationships do not. It doesn't happen often... but it should probably NEVER happen.

---

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

Cheers!