Currently, when creating a new wiki on PBwiki, one must choose between ‘Classic Editor’ and the ‘experimental WYSIWYG editor’. Depending on your answer, this enables (or not) our fancy new editor for that wiki. We’ve been receiving a lot of praise for the new editor (thanks guys!) as well as a few questions regarding continued support for our old interface that we would like to address.

As it stands now, there is no way to change editing style for a particular wiki. Once you create a WYSIWYG wiki, it can’t be edited in the classic “WikiStyleâ€? interface, and vice-versa.

We’re going to change that.

First and foremost, in January we will be giving all wiki administrators the ability to upgrade their wiki to WYSIWYG mode. There will be no charge for this upgrade!

Additionally, for those of you who just can’t get enough WikiStyle, you will also have the option of editing WYSIWYG wikis with our classic, WikiStyle editor. We can’t promise that all new WYSIWYG-specific features (like plugins) will be available, but you should still be able to use the same wiki markup that you have come to know and love.

As an aside, it is worth mentioning how we came around to this decision. The decision to maintain support for WikiStyle editing was greatly influenced by feedback from our users. We originally thought WYSIWYG would be the best option for everyone. But we sought feedback, mulled it over at lunch, and came to the conclusion that 1) we underestimated how much people like our classic interface and 2) Red Lobster’s cheese rolls are amazing. Listening to feedback is a big part of PBwiki, and drives a lot of the discussions here.

Stay tuned for more progress around WYSIWYG editing, and other new PBwiki features!

We’re so excited to welcome Brian Klug to the PBwiki team! He sold his house and flew to the Bay Area all the way from Virginia. He’ll be working on the WYSIWYG interface immediately, and then some other stuff we have up our sleeve. A little bit about Brian:

Brian co-founded MindSay with Adam Ostrow in 2003. Bringing over 12 years of software development and industry experience, he enabled the birth of a competitive blogging product in a tightly growing market. Before MindSay, he was president of his own web hosting company. At MindSay, he used his extensive product, technical and operational experience to architect, design and implement MindSay’s 130,000+ member social networking and blogging site.

Welcome, Brian!

There’s been a lot of discussion about the Peanut Butter Manifesto, in which Yahoo SVP notes that Yahoo is “spread too thin.” He also notes that he hates peanut butter.

Outrageous! Here’s our official response: In defense of peanut butter.

The wonderful Rhys Wynne has provided us a Welsh translation of our WikiStyle help page, adding to the long list of volunteer translations, including Chinese, Danish, Dutch, Esperanto, Filipino (Tagalog), Finnish, French, German, Greek, Hungarian, Italian, Japanese, Lithuanian, Norwegian, Polish, Portuguese, Russian, Serbian, Spanish, Swedish, Turkish, and Vietnamese. Thanks, everyone, for chipping in to help us help others! And if you’d like to provide a new translation not listed here, please email us at translate@pbwiki.com. Thanks!

So we’ve been talking to a lot of users who would like more control over who gets access to their wikis, and how. Some people really like the fact that we’re hosted and secure but want to use a behind-the-firewall LDAP server to authenticate users. Others have custom single-signon solutions (like Stanford’s WebAuth). Others yet want to support completely separate authentication measures, like being able to use Facebook, AIM, or Yahoo! to sign on. We’d like to support all of you, but only have so much time in the day. So we’ve gone and made something totally new, that nobody else in the wiki space can give you – an Authentication API.

What this will let you do is code your own web service that will authenticate a user against PBwiki however you want. We’re still sketching out the technical details but we’d love if you could take a peek and let me know what you think.

Hey, PBwiki-ers! It’s worth mentioning that the tags support that we rolled out this month across PBwiki was largely inspired by a series of wonderful meetings we had with Nitin Borwankar. This guy is like the Johnny Appleseed of the tagging world! If you need tags support in your application, talk with him and he’ll give you the know-how hookup.

Our rocking friends Jay & Ryan (vlogstars in their own right) came over to our new digs in San Bruno – we’re right by the SF airport, which is great, except for when the big planes come zooming overhead. Check out their awesome interview with our team!

We’ve just started to settle in at our new offices in San Bruno. This is a big step up for our little company! It’s been as much as a year of work-from-home and squatting at local cafes for the team. We also welcome Emily, our great new admin. In addition, here we are posting to our new blog. I’ve always been a little suspicious of blogs but it’s an effective way to spread the word about what PBwiki is up to and to keep in touch with our current and potential users and partners.

Hi! Here’s where we’re going to be posting updates about PBwiki, its users, and how you can use wikis to help you get more done. We look forward to interacting with you here and on our forums!

PBwiki is the largest and most awesome wiki farm on the ‘Net! Get yourself a free, password-protected wiki at PBwiki.com and join hundreds of thousands of others.