Progress Report - September 2024

Another month of progress here, at Backpack HQ. Most of the things we've been working on are under-the-hood, since our current goal is...

Another month of progress here, at Backpack HQ. Most of the things we've been working on are under-the-hood, since our current goal is to solidify the current version. We've made slow but steady progress on that! But there's one HUGE thing we've been cooking, that has us excited... so here goes:

AI-Powered Docs

We've been training working with an AI company, to develop an LLM capable to answer your documentation and development questions. After quite a bit of testing, we're happy with the results... so we want to give some users access to it. If you have access to any paid Backpack package... you'll have access to our experimental AI. When you're logged in, you should notice a bubble button in the bottom-right corner of the docs:

Please test it out and tell us what you think! Don't abuse it, since every query costs, but... you know 😄 Really give it a shot. We're very eager to understand if this is helpful during development. Depending on your feedback, we'll decide what to do next. If you guys are willing to pay for this, if not... we're open to ideas here.

Promo: Write and Win Backpack Licenses

We're starting competition in our community - Who can write the best Backpack article?. Write a quality piece of content about Backpack on any channel you want (Reddit, Medium, Dev.to, Hashnode, your own blog, even YouTube) and tell us about it on Show and Tell.

On the 31st of October, we'll pick the best 3 articles and give out the prizes:

• #1 best article gets a MULTI-PROJECT PRO License (worth 399 EUR)
• #2 best article gets a SINGLE-PROJECT PRO + DevTools License (worth 169 EUR)
• #3 best article gets a SINGLE-PROJECT PRO License (worth 69 EUR)

The best articles will be:

• promoted in our community, our blog and Twitter, to get more readers;
• praised in our next Progress Report, to give recognition to the best writers in our community;
• included in our blog (with a canonical link), if you want that;

Base rules:

• to qualify, the content must be new (no old content can be submitted);
• to qualify, the content must be high-quality and Backpack-related;
• to qualify, it must be written by a human, not ChatGPT; no cheating, ok?!

There is no given topic - you can write about whatever you feel other Backpack users will be interested in. Something you learned / discovered / invented works best - if you find it useful, others might too. Some problem you overcome. A case study for how you used Backpack.

Eager to see what topics you come up with! Let's do this - let's learn from each others' experience! 💪🏻

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.

Maintenance

Pedro has been pushing fixes left and right:

• CRUD - 19 bug fixes;
• PRO - 3 bug fixes;
• Theme Tabler - 1 bug fix
• 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

Slow month in terms of content. Karan has written 1 new article on our blog:

• Turn Multiple CRUD Buttons into a Dropdown

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

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

Cheers!