Progress Report: March 2025

Hey there, March has been a focused month for us. Most of our energy went into preparing Backpack v7 for release, and we’re nearly ther...

Hey there,

March has been a focused month for us. Most of our energy went into preparing Backpack v7 for release, and we’re nearly there. Still, there’s plenty to share — so here’s what we’ve been up to.

Maintenance

Backpack v6 has been very stable this month—Pedro didn’t push anything major to the core package. However, we did ship four updates to backpack/pro, along with a few smaller updates to other add-ons and packages. These were mostly small fixes and improvements, as we continue to smooth out the experience across the board. No breaking changes—just steady progress.

Support

Support is running smoothly - Jorge and Karan continued answering your questions, and we’re happy to see more and more users turning to Kapa AI inside the documentation. If you haven’t used it yet, here’s a quick guide on how to use Backpack Docs AI. Just a heads-up—Kapa AI won’t remain available to all paying users forever. If you want to try it, now’s the time.

The biggest problem that arose this month was that one of the CDNs we rely on - unpkg.com - has had uptime problems, so a lot of time was spent helping people with that. This is usually only a localhost problem, but a frustrating one. If you are facing issues on localhost with unpkg.com being down, a quick solution is to add BASSET_DEV_MODE=false to your .ENV file. You can read more about it here, but the good news is that:

• unpkg seems to have fixed their uptime problems;
• Pedro has already pushed a change to Basset that should alleviate this;
• in the next version of Basset (due in a few weeks), we have made it possible for you to replace a link that isn't working, in a non-breaking way; unpkg isn't working? you just put a link to a different CDN;
• in the next version of Backpack (due in a few weeks), we have removed most links from unpkg already, and we'll remove all of them;

We know this issue has been a pain... but we truly believe the solutions we've found will fix this for good.

Content

Karan published two new articles this month:

• Building a CRM with Backpack for Laravel (the fun & easy way)
• What can you do with Laravel Middleware? (More than you think)

The second one made a splash on Reddit—it resonated with a lot of Laravel devs. We’re continuing this series with more practical tutorials and recommendations. If there's anything you wanted to learn but didn't find clear explanation how... let us know in the comments below!

New Pricing Tier

We’ve added a new plan: Everything + Premium Support, for 999 EUR. This includes:

• Priority support from senior team members within 24h (workdays)
• Priority bug fixing—your issues get addressed before others
• Private conversations with the Backpack team via email or Discord

It’s ideal for teams that need fast, reliable help from the people who built Backpack. And we hope it further confirms that we've "got your back" (pun very much intended). Full details are on the pricing page.

v7 Sneak Peek

We’ve made major progress on Backpack v7 this month. Pedro finished two highly-requested features:

1. You can now include the List operation (DataTable) anywhere in your views. This opens the door to much more flexible layouts.
2. This opens the door to doing the same thing for forms - being able to add a Create/Operate operation anywhere too - which is the next big thing we're tackling.

We’re close to wrapping up the final list of most-requested features. Once that’s done, we’re launching. We also have a few surprises in store, including new fields and columns. I know we've made you wait quite a while for the new features, but it's important for us that we launch them with as few breaking changes as possible, which makes them longer to develop. But after v7 is launched... expect us to launch MANY more features - you won't believe the pace!

If you’ve built multiple projects using Backpack, we’d love your input. Is there a field, operation, or component you’ve needed in multiple projects, but Backpack didn’t offer it out of the box? Let us know. We might just add it.

Community & Customer Conversations

This month, we’ve been talking directly with teams who’ve built multiple projects on Backpack. These conversations have been incredibly insightful, and you’ll start seeing the results in our product decisions, support, and communication in the coming weeks.

We’ve also started working on case studies for some of these long-term users. If your team has used Backpack extensively, I’d love to hear your story. Reach out to me personally—I'm curious to see what you've built.

In parallel, we’ve begun crafting a series of landing pages tailored to different types of customers—freelancers, agencies, in-house teams, indie hackers—and the specific services we offer. The designs are ready and being implemented now. Can’t wait to show you soon.

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That’s it for March. Thanks again for using Backpack, supporting the project, and helping us make it better every month.

Until next time,
Tabacitu & The Backpack Team