Announcements

A recent issue with a client project inspired us to build a new Caching package to help with both fast caching but with some helpful extras for removing elements which may have similar keys. Essentially it's a trickster way of handling tags within caching.

• Cache:
  Say hello to a new package which handles caching via SQLite as well as some CloudFlare caching components

Sometimes we just have to take a big step and walk forward with a little leap. It's been a while since we made some heavier changes to our packages. We opted to remove some dependencies and drop some out of date methods. We're looking to start 2025 with some fresh eyes.

• Forms:
  Added a new 'setUp' method for any actions you wish to do to configured a form. Overhauled dependencies and shifted to TomSelect.
• Charts:
  Added a new plugins system for GeoCharts, and WordClouds
• Html:
  Added a new Word-Switcher component.

Based on some smaller enhancements on various packages, we opted to take a minor deep dive on some dependencies and noticed that some packages we use for various projects are no longer supported. Therefore, we will be bringing them into our collection, hopefully we can announce the details next month.

• Docs:
  Some general updates based on past work.
• Database:
  Minor fixes on the table-empty method.
• Mission Control:
  Improvements to traffic analytics.

It felt like a good time to finally start pushing all our systems to now use Vite as well as converting all JavaScript code to now be configured as modules.

• Scaffold:
  Switched to Vite configuration.
• Auth:
  Minor update
• Forms:
  Converted to JS module.
• HTML:
  Converted to JS module.
• Charts:
  Converted to JS module.
• Mission Control:
  Converted to JS module.

Sometimes a well structured decentralized system is exactly what you need. In other cases, its nice to centralize all your systems into one place. We introducted traffic monitoring to our Mission Control system this month and love having the new capabilities while we reduced our monthly systems cost.

• Scaffold:
  Minor correction for subscriptions.
• Forms:
  Minor bug repairs.
• Charts:
  Patch version bump.
• Mission Control:
  Added traffic monitoring systems.

Summer is an epic time of year, while its getting hot outside we're staying focused on client work and exploring some new ideas for more open source code!

• Support:
  Added tighter controls on keyword extraction.
• Forms:
  Minor bug repairs, and added Quill 2.0.2 support.

Sometimes its really nice to just be a little more free and have less UI dependencies.

• Forms:
  Minor fixes, and the ability to set option groups in Select fields, and some extra QOL changes.
• Maintenance:
  Added a new log archiving command
• Blacksmith:
  Added more quick commands for formatting your server and site configs.
• Scaffold:
  General updates and Honeypot fixes.

Various packages needed some updates and upgrading to support Laravel 11 and its release. Luckily we build pretty elegant packages so the updating of things only took one morning.

• All:
  All our packages were upgraded to support Laravel 11
• Scaffold:
  Various improvements to workflows, CSP and code styling.
• Support:
  Added a new simple up endpoint for load balance status checks, and an endpoint for easier docs browsing

Building some accreditation, in the community and beyond. We opted to put some effort into our support package to help reduce some repetition across our code bases.

• Forms:
  New simple datalist field alternative.
• Support:
  Added some various new Collection macros: paginate, chunkBy, sortByDate

More open source updates in prep of some upcoming projects. We've started work on a new project which will help us share more of what we know with the world. Other than that, we're actively working on marketing campaigns.

• HTML:
  Added Image comparison, Media player, Parallax, Lightbox, Countdown and some Text effects
• Forms:
  Minor fixes, and a simple custom boostrap select field.

We kicked off the year with adding some more toys to our HTML package as well as performing a variety of updates across our portfolio of components. Including some billing system changes (across all our apps too) and general documentation updates.

• Scaffold:
  General updates and better Billing system
• Support:
  Added some Cloudflare commands.
• Docs:
  General updates across all our packages

We have been focused on maintenance over the last few weeks. Upgrades, updates and rebuilds which drove us to create Blacksmith. You can think of it as 'Ansible' for Laravel Forge.

• Mission Control:
  Page load time warnings.
• Forms:
  Various small improvements especially in UI
• Blacksmith:
  New package for handling server and site rebuilds on Laravel Forge.

We've been working hard on a new platform for the laravelcollective domain, another new product, but this time completely not-for-profit all around. Beyond that, its been lots of nose to the grindstone to deliver fantastic results to our long term clients.

• Bootstrap Magic Extras:
  Some minor improvements all around.
• Forms:
  Minor improvements and some extra fields.
• HTML:
  Added text animations, and minor improvements.

Sometimes its nice to start fresh. This month we've been working hard on a relaunch of popupfeedback.com, we've also begun work on a redesign of Grafite's brand. Not much to show currently but we're certainly making progress.

• Database:
  Some better table tools
• Charts:
  More text sizing options.

We generally work on a long term basis with our clients, ensuring that their systems remain stable and optimal as their needs change. We also put that focus into our open source packages ensuring that they will help teams support their clients in the long run.

• Forms:
  Minor enhancements.
• Support:
  New features controls, and more handy reusable components

Sometimes its all about minor enhancements, sometimes its important to have public announcements. We've opted to add in public status pages now for Mission Control to help companies and customers keep track of whether or not an application is experiencing some behind the scenes issues.

• BMX:
  Minor updates
• Mission Control:
  Public status pages
• HTML:
  Minor enhancements
• Forms:
  Minor enhancements.

We've been actively maintaining and enhancing some packages lately as we prepare to bring on some more client work. We have some greenfield projects coming soon so it makes sense to test run fresh builds of projects overall.

• Scaffold:
  Added Vue components again, and made minor improvements
• Mission Control:
  Refactored some workflow for better User Experiences
• HTML:
  Minor enhancements
• Forms:
  Minor enhancements.

Added a new support package for the oddball needs we often have with extracting data from strings. We've also invested a ton of effort in adding proper Content Security Policy support to all our packages.

• HTML:
  More components, again!
• Forms:
  Lots of refactoring and improvements for Level 3 CSP support.
• Support:
  New package with handy tools for strings and models.
• Backup:
  Determined that this was not a valid package use case.

Generally speaking its been basic improvements of both developer experience and code quality. We were also able to add a new Auth package which will help with quickly building starting applications using various forms of authorization.

• Auth:
  All new package for handling some simple Auth measures.
• HTML:
  More components!
• Forms:
  Complete overhaul of the Table Field!
• Backup:
  Finishing up details on this package.

With the release of Laravel 10 we've been actively updating all our packages, while adding a new one to our list of assets. We've also been heavily focused on upgrading Mission Control to better serve our customers.

• Forms:
  Laravel 10 compatibility
• HTML:
  Laravel 10 compatibility
• Database:
  Laravel 10 compatibility
• Maintenance:
  Laravel 10 compatibility
• Charts:
  Laravel 10 compatibility
• Scaffold:
  Laravel 10 compatibility
• Backup:
  A new simple package for performing any type of simple file backup/restore actions you need. Coming soon.

We've been actively focused on performance lately. Doing our best to ensure quality code while reducing various dependencies in our systems and centralizing some code into better components for easier long term maintenance.

• Forms:
  Refactored all internal JS for better performance
• HTML:
  Added a new dynamic component method for centralizing HTML, JS and CSS into one space
• Scaffold:
  We've made some big improvements for code quality and reduction of depenencies

Much of the last few months we've been deep into client work and our open source offerings have had less focus. However we've still managed to make a few updates and fix some bugs along the way.

• Forms:
  Added blade component types for forms, and some new fields.
• HTML:
  Added more blade component types.
• Documentation:
  Various updates across all our open source documentation.

The magic of anything lies in its simplicity and what it prevents you from noticing. We've been putting lots of effort into various components of our workflow to help deliver a better user and developer experience.

• Forms:
  More enhancements for Livewire Integration.
• HTML:
  Added components for numerous UI cases.
• Mission Control:
  Added Slack support and various improvements to performance.

As the new year has begun we've kicked off with some enhancements to our various open source packages. We've also started working on significant improvements to Sumday as well as more ehancements to Mission Control to help us serve our customers even better.

• Forms:
  New render methods for easier integration with blade components
• Html:
  We released v1.0 of this handy package which can generate HTML components elegantly
• Database:
  We've added some handy macros for MySQL databases.
• Charts:
  Now with blade directives integration in your UI is even easier.

We've been working on general improvements to performance on numerous projects. We've also been working on documentation for various projects, so much so that we started building a system for it.

• Forms:
  v6.0 release, with new chaining methods, and minor performance improvements, and overall code quality improvements
• Scaffold:
  General improvements including a system based color scheme

We've been actively working on a variety of projects lately including Mission Control 2.0. A complete rewrite and rearchitecting of the original Mission Control to help us and other development companies keep a watchful eye on their digital products.

• Forms:
  Bug fixes, new password with reveal, custom data entry for select fields, form wizards and more!
• Charts:
  Version upgrade along with new chart components.
• Maintenance:
  A new package for handling basic maintenance commands for Laravel applications.

We've been working hard on improving out open source packages, we often make sure to take the time and do this before we get started on new products or projects. We're kicking the next quarter off with a new internal tool for project support regarding App stability and ticket management. Whilst we work on that, we'll be starting work on a new tool to help small businesses effectively communicate with their customers as directly as possible.

• Forms:
  Way more features added, disable on submit, loading icons, new EditorJS field, a card UI wrapper.
• Bootstrap Magic Extras:
  A new package of utilities that add to the existing ones for Bootstrap.

2020 was a hectic and transformative year for us as we're sure it was for you too. We had to reevaluate project ideas, drop some and add new ones. Though we were able to push forward on integrating some new features into some of our open source packages, we fell behind on developing our new flagship product Appnomaly (now rebranded as AppDigest). As such, we've decide to kick off this year with a refocused effort on it. From our team to yours, we're wishing everyone a great 2021 ahead.

• Forms:
  Livewire compatibility, more fields, and more customizability.
• Scaffold:
  Integrated Livewire components, and broad improvements to: the UI, Stripe integration and overall code quality.

As the summer draws to a close and our team gets ready for a cozy winter inside, we've begun work on some new tools and packages to help us deliver the best solutions for our clients. We've started extensive work on Appnomaly and are preparing for Sumday's next release which should be in the next month.

• All Open Source Packages:
  Minor updates across most of our packages in the past couple months, including better MIT licensing attribution and documentation.
• Forms:
  We added a payload method to set details in an action form. Rebranded the package and made general improvements
• Scaffold:
  Was updated to Laravel 8 along with some other various improvements

We started out last month by sponsoring three more open source developers. We also put more work into our existing packages and have been steadily working toward broader goals to help with code maintenance, including rebuilding some products from the ground up.

• Database:
  Database has received some broad updates to help backup specific tables, which can then be restored easily, or used for testing purposes.
• FormMaker:
  We added the ability to inject HTML snippets into forms now in order to get the layout exactly right, as well as several other features including blade components, CRUD components and JS minification.
• Charts:
  Due to a major change in a package we used all the time we had no choice but to build our own all new charts package which works with chartJS. Check it out here: https://github.com/grafiteinc/charts

We released the documentation for Scaffold and did some further refactoring and upgrading on its boilerplate code. We've also put lots of effort into our FormMaker package to help speed up development tasks. Our objective as always is to help developers and businesses have more time with their family and friends, and we will continue to delivery on that objective.

• Scaffold:
  We finished our initial documentation of Scaffold and will be slowly adding features as needed
• FormMaker:
  We added the ability to inject JavaScript into form fields, which reduces overall code for many forms in apps we make
• Maintenance:
  Our maintenance package is a new tool for handling redundant tasks on servers ensuring better delivery of your content
• Sumday:
  We're continuing work on teams and projects for Sumday, hoping to deliver by Q3
• Appnomaly:
  As a means of servicing our customers even more effectively, we've started work on Appnomaly an automated app maintenance SaaS.

We've been hard at work preparing some packages, working on documentation and designing new features for some of our projects. We also released a new package called Database which helps with some small mundane actions when working with MySQL databases. We'll be making more annoucements soon as we continue to map out our upcoming projects.

• Scaffold:
  Documentation is still in progress while we iron out some final details, though the billing component is done.
• Database:
  Initial release - We've got this one documented and released as v1.0.
• Sumday:
  We've started work on the projects component for Sumday to help you manage your billing concerns easily

It is with a heavy heart that we write this. But our team has decided that its time to retire our Builder, CMS and Commerce packages. Though both have in the past served us well, and we did intend on adding more features to them, but we have examined the options out there and decided that they're not a good fit anymore. Our team has opted move our focus to using Statamic for CMS needs and utilizing our new Scaffold Boilerplate for future projects. If anyone would like to take over the packages they are welcome to fork them, we will be archiving the repositories next week, while we work on documentation for Scaffold and hopefully a release within the next week or two.

• Builder:
  Abandoned - Replaced with Scaffold
• CMS:
  Abandoned - There are well built CMS platforms out there which outperform and offer more options than we have time for.
• Commerce:
  Abandoned - It's completely reliant on the CMS and we'd rather build something that has more potential customers
• Website/AccessControl/Activity:
  Abandoned - these didn't even see the light of day, but in favour of Statamic and Scaffold we've decided to drop these ideas.
• Scaffold:
  Initial release - Documentation is in progress along with the Billing component.

We recently released an all new open source package on NPM, which provides developers with a handful of helper methods in their JavaScript.

• Helpers:
  String and Array helpers similar to Laravel's but in JavaScript! Here's a link! https://www.npmjs.com/package/@grafite/helpers

Deciding what to build and how to impact the community is challenging. We've been discussing options of maintenance and long term commitments. Coupled with that comes technical debt chats and reviewing of goals and technologies we want to work with, as well as ways we want to help both developers and businesses. As such we've come to some final decisions regarding the direction of our open source packages. The hope with these new plans is that we will be able to help developers with well documented boilerplates as well as offer a collection of tools for existing custom built applications.

• Scaffold:
  Coming soon, documentation in the works along with finalizing the Stripe integration
• Commerce:
  v3 will be a complete revamp of the Commerce package in order to work more effectively with v4 of our CMS.
• CMS:
  We're currently working on v4 which is a large revamp of the package in order to break it down to essentails for easier long term maintenance. There will likely be some parts removed and placed into new packages.
• Website:
  We used to use our Builder package along with our CMS to provide an easy website solution. Since we've abandoned the Builder package we're currently working on Website which will be a boilerplate website with the CMS integrated.
• FormMaker:
  Is currently on v2.1 and will be continued.
• CrudMaker:
  Has been abandoned as we no longer use it to build any of our projects.

We're not always the happiest when we have to archive projects but sometimes it's needed. In our case, we've had lots of open source projects that have not gotten any attention and we've generally stopped using them. Over the next couple weeks we'll be archiving them. This also means we will no longer be maintaining them.

• Docs:
  All docs for archived packages will now move to their respective packages. They will be placed in the readmes.
• Commerce:
  Commerce was a great package to develop but it needs complete refactoring and updates and we currently do not have any projects using it.
• Builder:
  This was originally a flagship package for us, but we just don't use it anymore. We've moved to using a general boilerplate (called Scaffold) which we will be open sourcing soon
• Crypto:
  We're going to be archiving Crypto as its no longer needed since Laravel handles all of these features by default
• Homeforge:
  Though we used to actively use Homestead for general development Laravel's Valet has proven to be a better solution.

We're super excited to be announcing the upcoming arrival of some new packages. Checkout the information below to see what each package will cover!

• Scaffold:
  An opinionated Laravel boilerplate, for faster app development.
• Activity:
  A general activity tracker for Laravel applications (originally in Builder)
• AccessControl:
  A role based permission system (originally in Builder)