Progress Report - July 2026

While you've been on holiday, we've been cooking. Let's get into it! Maintenance CRUD - 2 updates (we're at v7.1.1) PRO - 3 updates (v...

While you've been on holiday, we've been cooking. Let's get into it!

Maintenance

• CRUD - 2 updates (we're at v7.1.1)
• PRO - 3 updates (v3.0.24)
• Theme-Tabler - 1 update (v2.0.8)
• Basset - 6 updates (v2.0.12)
• a few minor patches to other packages

Air Datepicker (PRO feature)

If you have access to our PRO addon, you should know there's a new field waiting for you to use. We call it air-datepicker after the library it's using. It's a great alternative to the date_picker, datetime_picker and daterange_picker fields. Instead of dealing with 3 different JS plugins (all relying on the aging moment.js library), this one does it all. Pedro wrote more about it in this article, check it out. Or you know... just go to its docs and start using it!

Support for pre-caching assets

Here's a problem you might not even know you had. Some assets are only loaded conditionally, inside an @if block, for example:

@if(app()->getLocale() !== 'en')
    @basset('https://cdn.example.com/locale-{{ app()->getLocale()}}.js')
@endif

The basset:cache command scans your blade files to find @basset calls. But it doesn't evaluate conditions. It can't "see" inside @if. So that locale script? Never cached until someone actually visits the page in Spanish. First visitor gets a delay while it downloads.

Enter basset_preload. In your config/backpack/ui.php, you can now list assets that should be cached even though they're not loaded on every page:

'basset_preload' => [
    'scripts' => [
        'https://cdn.example.com/locale-es.js',
        'https://cdn.example.com/locale-fr.js',
    ],
    'styles' => [
        'https://cdn.example.com/theme-dark.css',
    ],
],

then basset:cache will download them like any other asset. When the conditional @basset fires, the file is already there. No delay.

What's your Backpack v8 wishlist?

We're officially starting work on Backpack v8. We have plans to make this the most rock-solid and stable version yet. So we've started with the maintenance stuff: bumping and removing dependencies, fixing inconsistencies, etc. But we do plan to add quite a few fixes and features to it. So before we show you any of our plans... let us know what you would like to see in Backpack v8. What's your biggest gripe with Backpack v7? Or what's the one thing you'd like to see in v8? Comment below - even a one-line answer can get us to do something that'll make your life easier.

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That's it for July 2026. Thanks for using Backpack - we couldn't do this without your support.

Cheers!