At PBworks we keep track of all those support questions and feature requests that we receive from millions of users. Over time we noticed a pattern of frustration. The number one support request has consistently been, PLEASE FIX YOUR EDITOR!
Some of the things that you brought to our attention have been:
- Bullet points and numbering are funky
- Spacing and formatting are difficult
- Tables frustrate the living daylights out of me!
We totally agree. That’s why super-engineer BK2 spent the last six months building a faster, smarter, better editor. With this new editor it will be much easier to create lists, add tables and link images. Pages will load faster. Paragraphs will consistently maintain their formatting. Life will be a better place.
This is what the old editor looked like:
This is what the new tool bar will look like:
New features include the ability to create strike-through text. Also on educator workspaces, you can now create sub-script and super-script font.
There aren’t many changes to the tool bar, but there are a lot of changes to how the editor works. Here are a few things you will notice:
Linking – Just click a link and you’ll have the option of changing its URL or removing the link.
Tables – It’s now easier to insert a table AND format the column/cell/row.
Color – Now when you highlight a word, we save that color so you can apply it more than once.
Pasting from word – What you paste from word, we now remove more of the Word source code – which means you can edit and re-format your content.
Tell us what you think in the comments, or just leave a note for super-engineer BK2!
PBworks Official Blog 
BK2 – You did an awesome job. Thanks for working like mad, 24 hours a day, 6 days a week, for over six months. We’ll drink a toast to you when everyone has their new editor 🙂
-Kristine
This is a HUGE project! Way to go, BK2. I can’t wait!
Thanks BK2! Is the new editor still based on fckeditor/ckeditor, or something new?
@amanda – The new editor based on TinyMCE, but it has been heavily customized much more then the old editor
BK2 and the rest of Pbworks, thank you so much for tackling these issues.
I also want to thank you for the new option of being able to import a document as a pbworks page. It saves so much time with the automatic upload of images and of course, makes information immediately accessible without having to download a document.
New editor has so many kinks to work out. Working within ‘s is ridiculously screwy at best. Font formatting doesn’t reset like it used to. Font formatting doesn’t take effect when you tell it to…
I hope that these are known issues and that the current state of the editor is considered a “work in progress…”
@Travis – Sorry to hear you are having trouble with the new editor. As with any complex new feature we are working hard to fix any issues.
If you have specific bugs please contact support and include as much detail as possible about the page you were editing and specific steps you took that caused the error.
i think its betterthan the old one! x
Good job guys!
The first days things did not work as I expected, but looks like you are hitting in hard and now is almost 100% working.
I really miss a button, the tipical copy format one, makes things easier, but no problem.
What is giving us a big problem is the new editor and our sidebar with CSS.
Please let us know how to fix/work with it.
Thank you and again, congratulations with your work.
Regards,
Manu
COOL! COOL! COOL! COOL! cool… What were we takin about again?
It makes it easy to make tables.
Check out my teacher’s wiki. http://jhopciagrade4.pbworks.com/
It’s a great upgrade but I find that I can’t color links and that the little boxes that keep popping up while i am editing are very annoying.
I have to agree with Travis to some extent-
“New editor has so many kinks to work out. Working within ’s is ridiculously screwy at best. Font formatting doesn’t reset like it used to. Font formatting doesn’t take effect when you tell it to…
I hope that these are known issues and that the current state of the editor is considered a ‘work in progress…’ “
One new thing I really like is the option to save and continue. I also like the new feature for editing already posted links. The are both very nice. Thank you. Still wish the Google spreadsheets would be allowed to fill a page.
Susan
Hi Susan,
You can make a google spreadsheet as big as you like. Simply change the height and width information in the code that google provides you. The default size is 500 x 300, you can change this to 1,000 by 600 to make the spreadsheet a little larger.
-Kristine
Thanks for addressing those issues, they were big ones. However I’m having difficulty making some of the features work. Inserting a table is still causing problems as the “pop up menu” to edit the table never appears. I’m working with support on this one. I thought I’d mention it! THanks!
Hi,
Couple of things when I tried some recent edits – when I hit the insert table button, nothing happens most of the time. Only once after many attempts did a popup appear to select the number of rows and columns. Also the image properties have been reduced significantly, you can no longer change the dimensions and ratio of the image in the dialog? Also it seems to undo text format changes randomly.
The new features sound great!
@ipodnerd – we have recently fixed a bug with coloring links, which should make that now possible. As far as the tooltips, are you editing documents with lots of links and would like an option to disable tooltips from appearing?
@Stephanie and @Michael – we are investigating reports of several issues inserting and editing tables. Sorry for the inconvenience, we are working quickly to improve that experience soon.
Lately, I am having problem when creating new pages. Only the top of the page appears after saving. I can only see the whole page when I switch to Edit mode! This is really a major problem when posting material to my students!
Is working on the new features and the new updates causing this problem?
I like all the new changes to the interface, and looking forward to use the enhanced editor.
Rawia
Hi Rawia,
Please contact support at support@pbworks.com so we can help with this bug. The new features should not affect page creation.
-K
I absolutely love “Save & Continue” and the reduced amount of formatting code being imported along with Word docs. I spend far too much time cleaning up code for my users who can’t re-format after uploading. [I still advocate – Copy, paste in Notepad, copy, paste in Wiki]. Would be great for Excel as well.
Having difficulty selecting the colors I want for background and borders for table cells – the color picker slide bar and color screen are tiny. Was forced to create a Word doc, use More colors feature within Text colors, get the hex for the desired color, then back to wiki. And the “borders” selection only colors the top and left borders of the cell.
Still, very, very cool.
It would be great if you could add a navigational menu creator or button creating function that allowed the user to embedd a navigation system at the tops of thier pages other than using just links and the sidebar.
It would be great if you could add a button to edit of an image. Right now you can right click and edit an image size, but it doesn’t always work, so adding a button on the tool bar would make life much easier.
Furrealz? That’s mareuvlosly good to know.
Good stuff. Now question of the day — will the editor work with the iPad? Or will that have to wait until future upgrades? Or will there be an iPad app for reading/editing pages (perhaps with limits on functionality)?
Ditto on Lamont’s questions. I love pbworks and I love my iPad but they don’t work together. I was able to edit wikispaces.com wikis using my iPad but I really don’t want to leave pbworks. Any suggestions?
iPads, iPads, iPads! Do my teachers have to abandon PBworks to use on iPad? Plans?
thank you