Today we announce a new way to share pages in Backpack. Now when you share a page you can decide who may edit the page and who may only view the page. This allows certain people to be responsible for editing pages and to allow others to read their pages without allowing the others to make changes. It’s a very useful feature, especially for larger teams.

Here’s how read-only pages work. When you click “Make a new page” you’ll see a link below the people checkboxes that says “Specify who can make changes to this page.”

New link on the 'Make a new page' screen

The checkboxes are replaced by a table when you click the “Specify…” link. The people on your account appear on the left-hand column with the familiar checkboxes to give them access to the page. Then to the right of each person you can set whether they can “change the page” or “only view the page.” Two links above those right-hand columns allow you to apply the same setting to all people at once. By default everyone can change the page.

Checkboxes with permission options

In this example we want to allow David, Jason and Sarah to change the page. Everyone else will have read-only access. The settings look like this:

Customized permission settings

When David, Jason or Sarah open the page they will see the usual editing options. They can add information to the page, edit what’s there, and move things around like any other page. Here’s how the page looks to people who are allowed to make changes:

An editable page

Everyone else on the account will see the read-only version of this page. There are no links on the top of the page to add content. Instead the header says “You can view this page but you cannot make changes.” There are no links to add content, no edit links, no delete links, and no drag handles to re-order page elements. Check boxes cannot be checked or unchecked. This is what people see when they are only allowed to view the page:

A read-only page

Read-only pages are a very useful addition to Backpack. We hope they inspire your team with new ways to share Backpack Pages.

“All Pages” is updated with page icons

In addition to read-only Pages, today’s update includes a refreshed design for the “All Pages” screen. The old design was a plain list of links and often half of the screen was empty space:

Original 'All Pages' design

The new design uses two columns to better fill the page. New icons give the screen more style and interest:

Updated 'All Pages' design

Collapse and expand completed list items

We’ve also answered a frequent request regarding completed list items. People were frustrated by the way their lists got longer and longer as they completed more items. Eventually the page got too long, and the only option was to delete the completed items. This is a problem because many people prefer to keep their completed items for future reference or for reasons of accountability. Here’s an example of a long list of completed items:

Original list design with completed items

We’ve solved this problem by collapsing all but the last three completed items:

Collapsed completed items

Click the link at the bottom of the list to reveal all the completed items:

Expanded completed items

You might also notice we added dates to the beginning of each checked item. Those dates are very useful when your team collaborates on a list and you wish to keep track of when the different tasks were completed.

We hope you like the updates

We’re really happy with these updates to Backpack and we hope you find them useful. Thanks for your continued support!