Progress Report - Nov 2022

It's been a busy month here at Backpack. We've started working on Backpack v6, organized a Black Friday AND managed to start and finish...

Cristian Tabacitu

Published on 30 November 2022 in News

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It's been a busy month here at Backpack. We've started working on Backpack v6, organized a Black Friday AND managed to start and finish a few new features for v5. Let's dig into it!

Maintenance

Since our last progress report we've had:

20 bug fixes in CRUD
8 bug fixes in PRO

New Features

Phone Field (PRO)

Big thanks to our team member Jorge Castro for building this one 🙏

If you store phone numbers in your database, there's now an easy way to allow admins to punch them in - using the new phone field type. It'll allow them to easily pick (or read) the prefix using the flag dropdown.

You can validate this using Laravel's default numeric or if you want something advanced, we recommend Laravel Phone, which will allow you to check it has a certain country prefix... and a lot more.

Note: this field has some additional JS and CSS, so in addition to doing a composer update to get it, you also need to do php artisan backpack:publish-assets to publish its assets.

Publish Assets Command

Previously, in order to publish the Backpack assets... something that we recommend you do every once in a while... you had to do:

php artisan vendor:publish --provider="Backpack\CRUD\BackpackServiceProvider" --tag=public --force

We could never remember that either! So we created a simple command to do it:

php artisan backpack:publish-assets

Now that's better, isn't it?

Black Friday Discount

If you're subscribed to our Security & Progress Newsletter... which you definitely should be... you'll know that we've had a huge 40% Black Week discount, for the first 100 buyers. That went very well... better than we expected... so at your request, we've added 15 more. Then we've added 15 more offers, but with a lower 25% discount. But... they're all gone now... sorry.

What Do You Want in the New Version?

Yes, it's official. We have two team members (Pedro and Antonio) working on Backpack v6 right now 🎉 We plan to launch it in Feb 2023, right after the new version of Laravel comes out.

So here's our question to you... what do YOU want to see in Backpack v6? What do you want different? What do you want to stay the same? Let us know in the comments below 👇

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That's it from us, for November. We're working on a few more cool stuff - so please subscribe to our weekly/monthly digest if you haven't already, follow us on Twitter or like us on Facebook.

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

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Reactions & Comments

What do you think about this?

Darren Glanville

For v6 would be good to have images store automatically without having to put extra code in to Models

Reply

Cristian Tabacitu

Right - noted! Thanks 🙏

Reply

Manual setting of column width and "numeric" input type for Editable Columns

Reply

Cristian Tabacitu

We're on it!

Reply

In v6 I would love to see a block editor / builder where you can choose from a pre defined list of field types and add them in any order which are then stored as json. It doesn’t need to be in a fancy editor just a list. Also a modal or slide out for selecting one too many with searching and filtering.

Reply

Cristian Tabacitu

Hmm... that's interesting. If I understand correctly, you can already do exactly that, using the Repeatable field - https://backpackforlaravel.com/docs/5.x/crud-fields#repeatable-pro - you'd just have to limit the amount of entries to 1. Would that work for you?

Reply

Thank you for replying! No I don’t think it will unless I’m reading the docs wrongly. I understand repeatable adds more of the same forms again and again. What I’m talking about is the creation of different blocks (so different forms) depending on what the user picks. I.E a text area for content, or a heading consisting of a text box and a sub title. So by the end you have lots of these blocks in any order making up your content. Statamic does it well as their Replicator field and Filament have it as their Builder field. The interface can be the same as the replicator just with choices of which block form to display each time.

Reply

Cristian Tabacitu

Oh right, I understand now. We did have something for this in Backpack v3 (I think) but never released it because the underlying JS library became unmaintained and there was little demand for this from our audience. But now more and more people are asking for it, so we'll do it in 2023! Take a look here for a screenshot - this is what you meant, right? https://github.com/Laravel-Backpack/community-forum/issues/240#issuecomment-1363774354

Reply

Yes, that's what I'm talking about, however in my opinion that's too advanced. It's not really your place to provide me as a developer with a full-page editor in Javascript, more of the ability to structure content using form input. If you start with Repeatable and allow it to have different forms I think you will be 90% there and it's got to be easier to make and maintain. Leave the layout structure to frontend views and have Backpack concentrate on the types of 'form' content and their order. For example, in that screenshot, you have text and an image next to each other in a grid. Forget that for now and if I as the developer want to allow an image on the left I have a field in that form for alignment. Then my front end floats the image (or does whatever it does with a left aligned image).

Reply

I'd like to see better documentation & how-tos. I'm constantly stuck with searching around for answers that I never really find.

Reply

Cristian Tabacitu

On it! We're working on a series of video tutorials and articles right now, we expect them to be ready even before v6! Thanks 🙏

Reply

I'd like to see the ability to use Laravel Backpack fields on my front-end. Example: I want my users to be able to create repeatable fields in my app's form logic but I can't re-use the repeatable field's code to do that so I have to duplicate logic and worry about validation, etc. Big pain. Thanks!

Reply

Cristian Tabacitu

You're right, the way forms & fields are built right now... they _can_ be re-used, but it's not easy, and definitely not recommended. I have good news though - for v6 we're building a few form components already, and those are built with re-usability in mind. As long as they both use Bootstrap, you'll be able to use back-end forms in your front-end 🎉

Reply

I would like guidance on how to phpUnit UT a Backpack CRUD panel once it is set up. I'd like to write some UT's that verify that the basic functions work. It is easy for a view, but what do you suggest for an edit and update? How can I test that a certain field value is displayed and modified through backpack?

Reply

Cristian Tabacitu

Totally agree - we should document how to write Unit Tests, and maybe even make it easier. We already had this on our to-do list, I've just prioritized it so we do it sooner - https://github.com/Laravel-Backpack/docs/issues/367

Reply

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