We’ve been hard at work for many months improving Backpack. Today we’re proud to unveil what we’ve been working on. The new Backpack is live!

Here’s a quick summary of the major new features:

• Move items anywhere on the page
• Move stuff to other pages
• Full text search on all pages
• Page dividers to better organize a page
• Multiple picture galleries
• Reorder pictures in galleries
• ...and more!

We hope you like the changes as much as we do. Thanks again for your continued support!

-The crew at 37signals

Awesome – thanks!

This is so sweet, thanks guys!!!!

I agree, something I’ve been looking forward to for quite some time, and as always you all have pulled it off with your usual good taste.

I did have one question, perhaps I should post it under bugs; have the formatting results of the use of Textile (specifically tables) changed?

quidire, we didn’t change formatting options, but we changed a lot of styles so it’s possible that we may have missed one. Please post to the Troubleshooting forum. Thanks.

You guys. I’ve never been happy about giving people my money, but I would gladly pay the 5 or 10 bucks it costs to have a backpack account.

Backpack was already great, and you just made it spectacular. I’m a big fan!

—
EDIT

I do have a couple of suggestions

• Live search would be pretty cool in the uper right search box (like in highrise). When you search, you’re simply returning a list of page titles, so the search content isn’t that big, and could fit in the space
• It would be cool if Open Bar was integrated into backpack

I totally get your aproach on design: “under-doing the competition”, so this suggestion may or may not be in agreeance with that, by having sub-lists within lists is something I find myself wanting a lot

Thanks!

Great update guys! I’m looking forward to trying out the new features. Way to go!

William: We’ve mentioned elsewhere that OpenBar will be coming to Backpack. It just didn’t make it into the release tonight. Tonight’s release was already big enough that we wanted to focus on the basics.

Expect OpenBar to show up in Basecamp within a couple weeks.

Is the mobile formatted version of backpack now gone for good? Appreciate the new stuff anyway!

sph, it’s still there. add a /mob to the end of your BP URL.

oops, sorry. it must’ve been then some hassle with my bookmarks as the full version kept showing up.

Now with move between pages feature and search, I must say the backpackit is really worth the money!

What happened to the Links and Home sections?

Otherwise the update is very nice :)

Andy, Home is still there. It’s linked up in the sidebar. If you renamed the page it’s not going to be “Home Page” anymore.

Links are still there on pages that had links, but we’ve removed that option moving forward. It was almost never used (less than 1% of all pages had “links”). You can still make your own links between pages using HTML or Textile in a note or list, of course.

I am having problems creating new writeboards, every time I try to make on it gives me the “oops” message. Just an FYI :)

This is great! Thanks guys:-)

It looks liked you wiped all the old forum posts as well? May want to reset people’s post counters… unless the idea was to leave them on purpose as a sign of seniority even without the posts lingering. :-)

If that was the idea I can’t argue.

Is the “body” section now gone as well? I used it to import custom CSS for my pages. Seems it’s bit the dust (??)

Otherwise, the new Backpack is fantastic! Love the upgrades.

Looks like the body was just turned into a title-less note at the top of the page… any reason you still couldn’t put CSS there?

Yeah, nobody has noticed the total file size bump, and the apparent no limitation on active reminders..

(..the page http://www.backpackit.com/upgrade/ linked from the Account page is not up to date…)

The changes look great, but has the API changed?

My custom ruby script that uses the API is now broken. That’s okay, I don’t mind troubleshooting it, but it’d be nice to have some updated API documentation.

Thanks,
Dan

http://developer.37signals.com/backpack/

Is this not up-to-date? If not, shame on 37s for missing a crucial part of a new upgrade (the documentation).

Update: Looks like the API docs are updated and good to go! Good job 37s crew!

Thanks Josh. I didn’t know about that URL. I was looking at http://www.backpackit.com/api/ which has not been updated.

Yeah, they should probably remove that page, update it, or link out…

Does anyone else feel that the display of the text is a little bit ‘off’? I’m not a designer, so can’t explain it very well – it just seems to me that the text is now too ‘bunched up’ – it doesn’t look as pleasing to read as it did before. The new features are great, but the design of the pages was better before IMO.

Thank you, I’m a designer and I refrained from commenting about this to avoid being picky (like swiss designers can be) but I feel exactly like you. Line-spacing needs some opening up by a pixel or two. As it was before I guess.