PBworks Official Blog

While PBworks has always been accessible on your smartphone or tablet, until recently, the built-in browser on iPads and iPhones didn’t allow rich text web editing.

The good news is that browser technology has now advanced to the point where rich text editors like our wiki page editor will now work on iOS devices.  As of tonight, we’ve released an upgrade that allows all PBworks users to edit PBworks wiki pages on their iPads and iPhones (you’ve been able to edit wiki pages on Android devices for some time).

Give these new capabilities a spin and less us know what you think!

30Boxes was one of the first plugins we added to PBworks back when the service was still called PBwiki.  This simple calendaring application let our users add a shared calendar to any workspace, and to have that calendar show up on multiple pages.  And while 30Boxes has never been used by most of our users, it has a loyal following.

Unfortunately, 30Boxes has become an “orphan” product.  Its creators have moved on to other projects, and last week, the entire service suffered a 1-day outage.  While service has since been restored, it seems clear that without future investment of resources, it is likely 30Boxes will become less viable.

While we could simply keep 30Boxes as a plugin and simply offer it on an “as is” basis, we don’t feel that this is good for our user experience.  Therefore, we have decided to phase out the 30Boxes plugin.

The first step, which we have already undertaken, is to disable new insertions of the 30Boxes plugin.  We cannot in good conscience allow people to add a service we fear will not be reliable in the future.

The next step, which will take place on June 30, will be the disabling of the 30Boxes plugin.  After that, existing insertions will stop working as well.

We’ve chosen a date more than 90 days in the future to give our users plenty of time to seek alternatives.  This may involve using our HTML/JavaScript plugin to insert the calendaring service of their choice, or using other features within PBworks as an alternative.

For Business users, here is the relevant HTML/JavaScript documentation.  And here is the equivalent HTML/JavaScript documentation for our Personal and Education users.

UPDATE:

It sounds like 30boxes is a key part of many of your wikis.  As a result, we’ve come up with a compromise solution that will lessen our exposure to any potential 30boxes shutdown, while allowing you to continue using the product.

On July 1, while we will no longer support the embedding of the 30boxes calendar, any existing embeds will link to the same calendar on the 30boxes.com website.  This way, you can maintain access to 30boxes if you wish to continue using the product despite the warning signs, but we can prevent a 30boxes outage from affecting the wiki pages on which they’ve been embedded.

We’ve just rolled out a major improvement to all our users, both paid and free.

One of the important elements of PBworks is the ability to organize wiki pages, files, and folders in our Pages & Files manager.  This screen includes a lot of neat capabilities, like being able to drag and drop items between folders, and to upload files simply by dragging them from your desktop to the desired folder.

Today, we made it even better.

The new Pages & Files manager presents a cleaner, uncluttered interface AND provides more information on individual pages and files.  The secret to this seeming paradox is our “More” button, which allows you to see detailed information for the page or file you specify:

Now, rather than seeing a bunch of repetitive links that appear for each item (e.g. Edit, Rename, Delete, Move), you get a cleaner view with the ability to quickly drill down for the details.

As a by-product of this streamlining, we’re able to fit even more pages and files onto a single screen.  A typical user on a 1368 x 768 screen will be able to see 15 pages/files per screen, versus 10 files per screen on our previous interface.  That’s a 50% improvement.

For more details on using the Pages & Files manager, visit our user manual.

Just last week, we rolled out major improvements to how you can work with files in PBworks to our business customers.   We’ve gotten such a good reaction to these improvements that we’ve decided to make them available to everyone, including free users.

Starting with Release #520, everyone will be able to tag and comment on files, while premium users on Classroom and Campus Edition will be able to set file-level access permissions, just as they’ve been able to do with wiki pages and folders.

You can read up on all the details here.

One of the actions I’ve often found myself taking in PBworks is manually creating a copy of a wiki page.

For example, I use PBworks to record meeting notes for recurring meetings.  At the end of each meeting, I would have to remember to do the following:

1. Enter Edit mode
2. Click “Source” to enter Source mode
3. Select all and copy the source HTML
4. Click “Cancel” to go back to View mode
5. Click the “Create a page” link to start the create page process
6. Type in a page name and click the “Create page” button
7. Click “Source” to enter Source mode
8. Paste the source HTML I copied back in Step 3
9. Click “Save”

Now I got pretty good at doing this quickly, but the fact is, I had to go through *NINE STEPS* to simply copy a page.

With the new “Copy this page” feature, we’ve reduced this to two steps:

1. Click “Copy this page”
2. Name the copy and click the “Copy” button

Those two steps do everything that the previous nine steps did; they copy the exact page contents, including links and plugins, but not including comments or page revision, and they place the copy in the same folder as the original page.

In fact, “Copy this page” even goes one better, by copying security settings and tags as well.

“Copy this page” is available to all our users, free and paid.  For more details on how to use “Copy this page”, you can check out our user manual:

Free/Educational Users: http://usermanual.pbworks.com/Copy-this-page

Business Users: http://docs.pbworks.com/Copy-this-page

As paid users know, PBworks has a very flexible security system.  Using custom page- or folder-level security, you can specify exactly who can view or edit a page, down to the individual user.

However, until now, there has been one downside to applying Custom Security settings.  These security settings have been exclusive.  That is, once you specified Custom Security, only those people you explicitly added would have access to the page or folder.

This is fine for many uses, but it is difficult when you want to expose a particular page to a particular user without affecting how other people access the page.

Here’s an example: Let’s say I’m working on a new case study.  When I’ve written the content, I want the customer who is the subject of the case study, Jane, to be able to review the page and make her edits.

Under the classic Custom Security system, I could set up Jane as a page-level only user and then add her to the case study page.  However, this would also prevent any non-admins from viewing the case study, cutting off folks like Alexis and Sam from the PR team.  To maintain Alexis and Sam’s access, I’d either have to explicitly add them as users, or make them workspace administrators.

Adding them as users under Custom Security is a hassle, and making them administrators may not necessarily be appropriate or viable.

Enter Additive Security.  Now, when you set up Custom Security on a page or folder, you can add Jane as a user without changing anyone else’s ability to access the page.

Plus, you can always use “Who can see this?” to see an explicit list of everyone who has access to the page or folder.

Additive Security makes it even easier to use PBworks to collaborate with people outside your organization.  For more details and illustrated instructions, check out our user manual:

• Custom Security for Academic users
• Custom Security for Business users