Progress Report - October 2024

New month, new things to share! Hold onto your seats... this one has some very juicy announcements - new features, new add-ons, new bug...

New month, new things to share! Hold onto your seats... this one has some very juicy announcements - new features, new add-ons, new bug fixes, and to top it all off... new AI integrations 😱. Yes, it's been a productive week here at Backpack HQ. Let's get to it:

AI-Powered Community Bot

We're so happy with the answers provided by our new Docs AI, that we've trained it to answer our community forum on Github, too. Post a question in our forum... and the first answer will be from our Docs AI. There's a lot to unpack here, so if you're interested (and you should) please read more about it here. In the meantime I'll leave you with this image, to show just how effective it is:

This. Is. CRAZY! We're so excited about this, that we've turned it into a game. Check it out here. Big thanks to Jorge for making this integration!

New Addon

Pedro has not only crushed it in terms of bug fixing, but he's also taken the time to create a quick way us Backpack people to see the stats recorded by PAN. What is PAN?

Pan is a lightweight and privacy-focused PHP product analytics library. It’s designed as a very simple package that you can install via composer require and start tracking your pages or components with a simple data-pan attribute.

It was created by Nuno Maduro a few weeks ago and... Backpack already provides an admin interface for PAN, with this add-on. Check it out, it's pretty cool!

The Winners for our October Promo

Last month we had a promo - we promised FREE LICENSES to a few people who write a Backpack article, create a video or package... any quality content, really.

We're happy to announce that we have two winners:

• SELIM GORMUS has won a MULTI-PROJECT PRO license (worth 399 EUR), thanks to his add-on for LeafletJS for Backpack. Check it out - it's pretty cool to have that already solved for your next project, isn't it? Feel free to install it, give it a try and give feedback.
• KIDD TANG has won a SINGLE-PROJECT PRO license + DevTools (worth 168 EUR), thanks to his article: Boost Laravel Backpack Security with WebAuthn Passkeys. We really enjoyed the article - so much so, that we're in the process of giving feedback and having it posted on our blog as well. So... stay tuned for that!

This was fun - maybe we should do it again in a few months! Let us know in the comments below if you think it's a good idea too.

Maintenance

Pedro has been pushing fixes left and right:

• CRUD - 7 bug fixes;
• PRO - 6 bug fixes;
• DevTools - 1 bug fixe;
• Theme Tabler - 2 bug fixes;
• Theme CoreUIv2 - 2 bug fixes;
• Theme CoreUIv4 - 4 bug fixes;
• a few other fixes to our other free packages

Support

Jorge & Karan has been answering our customer inquiries this month, and gotten to some issues that have gone unanswered for a long long time. We're clearing our backlog faster than ever 💪🏻

New Content

Very productive month in terms of content as well. New articles on our blog:

• How to set up your PHP environment - Laravel Herd & MySQL, by Karan;
• How to add a custom Livewire form to Backpack, by Karan;
• 🍣 Sushi — Your Eloquent model driver for other data sources, by Karan;
• New: Docs AI Answers your Community Questions, by Tabacitu;

If you haven't already, subscribe to our blog article digest to get these articles as soon as they're out. We've active on Twitter too - follow us for a daily dose of Laravel and PHP tips & tricks.

Quick Ask

If you haven't given us a star on Github, please spare 3 seconds and give us a star. It could help more people discover our project. We only have around 3000 stars - which is not a lot for a project of our size and history - we never paid attention to this number. So let's fix that - let's get that number where it's supposed to be 💪 Give a star to this repo.

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

Cheers!