What's Next for Backpack - August 2018

About the elephant in the room (no, not the PHP elephant). Nova coming out does not mean Backpack is going away. That's crazy-talk :-)....

About the elephant in the room (no, not the PHP elephant). Nova coming out does not mean Backpack is going away. That's crazy-talk :-). I'll try to be as short as possible here, I'll just answer the things I've been asked multiple times.

Backpack will definitely support Laravel 5.7. People have already used them together, and they say there are zero breaking changes for us. There's even a PR for it.

We're not going anywhere, don't worry, keep building using Backpack. If anything, Nova launching has proved the problem we're working on is an important one. Our roadmap stays the same:

• v3.4 - still pushing updates to it;
• v3.5 - will be launched days/weeks after L5.7 is out (still a lot of good stuff to include in v3);
• v3.6 - might be launched in another 6 months, if we develop more cool stuff we can include in a non-breaking way;
• v4.0 - yes, we will officially be working on it in the next few months. It will become a priority after v3.5 and yes, it will be awesome :-) But we don't want to rush it to market - Backpack v3 has been around for 2.5 years already, with only minor breaking changes. We want Backpack v4 to also be a stable tool you can rely on. We've been gathering feedback from thousands of people over these 2.5 years - very exciting to build the admin panel of our collective dreams. But don't expect it to be here any time soon. Best-case ETA - end of 2018. If you're using Backpack on multiple projects and plan to continue doing so, go ahead and purchase the Backpack Unlimited License. We're months away from v4, and even then, we'll give discounts or early access to recent Unlimited buyers. We'll handle the upgrade in a fair manner and make sure you get your bang-for-buck, we're good guys here.

Our goal stays the same: we aim to be on 50% of all Laravel installs one day. Sounds crazy, I know :-) But the way I see it - we're the only ones that want it, the closest to getting it, and this won't change any time soon.

Thanks for using Backpack and supporting us - we'll keep up with the good work.

PS. Have you seen our brand-new documentation? The docs were your #1 complaint, so we've spent a lot of time on this - really hope you like it.