Progress Report - January 2025

First month of 2025 has already come and gone - wow! We're working on a few big things, that haven't seen the light of day yet, so... w...

First month of 2025 has already come and gone - wow! We're working on a few big things, that haven't seen the light of day yet, so... we're excited! We're eager to finish and show them to you. But let's talk about what we can show you:

Maintenance

Pedro has pushed some fixes to our packages. We are more stable than ever:

• CRUD - 7 bug fixes;
• PRO - 2 bug fixes;
• a few other fixes to our other free packages;

Support

Jorge and Karan have been monitoring the discussions in our community, and answering where our AI hasn't done a great job. This month, our AI has had a few days of downtime 👀. Don't worry, it wasn't working on the AI uprising... and it wasn't mad on us humans. It was just a bug! It's back online now, and all the discussions have already been answered anyway - either by a robot or by us humans.

New Content

New articles on our blog in November:

• Custom Blade directives for your views - by Karan Datwani;
• How to use Backpack fields on non-CRUD pages - by Karan Datwani;
• How to install MailPit on Laravel Forge - by Cristian Tabacitu;

You might notice that Karan is working on:

• a series of articles on how to use Backpack in advanced scenarios;
• a series of articles on how to use Laravel's features and conventions, in your Backpack project and outside it;

If you have any suggestions for articles... please let us know in the comments below! If you've found something difficult to do, or learnt something cool - you can write an articles on our blog too! Send an email to [email protected] with your idea, let see if it's a good fit!

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.

Backpack v7 is now in alpha!

As mentioned in our last monthly update, we have started working on Backpack v7 a while back. Pedro and I have poured out hearts into it, and... I'm happy to announce that we've just tagged v7-alpha 🎉 This is a major milestone for v7 - it means the BIG things have already been done. We're now merging more features into it, so things will progress a lot faster. We might still introduce some minor breaking changes, so we do NOT recommend anybody use it yet. But we're getting there - with a bit of luck, next month I might tell you we're in beta!

Before you ask... we plan to launch Backpack v7 soon after Laravel launches its own new version, so you can upgrade them together. Normally that's in February-March, but a few times there were delays. We try to launch new versions as rarely as possible, but some of the fixes we needed to do... required breaking changes. That being said, we are careful to not have too many breaking changes, and we'll have an upgrade guide ready for you, as always. Normally it takes 15-45 minuts to upgrade a Backpack project, and that's our goal this time too!

Right now, the biggest things you can look forward to, in Backpack v7, is the fixes in some of the complex bits we have - Uploaders, repeatable and Uploaders inside repeatable (🤯). If you've had problems with them in the past, this update should fix them all.

In terms of features, we are working on some cool things... but we want to hear what you want! Please comment on this article, telling us what's ONE thing you wish Backpack v7 will bring.

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