When you’re working as hard to optimize a user experience as PBwiki does, beta browsers present a bit of a dilemma.

On the one hand, we want to support as many of our users as possible. On the other hand, it doesn’t make sense for us to do a lot of engineering work to support a browser until we’re pretty sure that its been stabilized.

For the most part, beta browsers will work, but there’s no official guarantee.

For example, we absolutely plan to support Firefox 3.1. But until the beta is set, we’ll probably hold off on making changes…after all, Mozilla might change the 3.1 code further before it’s finalized, which means that any work we do now could be wasted, or even worse, cause more problems down the line.

Today collaborating on your wiki became that much easier!

We’re excited to introduce the new “Send a link” feature. This feature lets you tell other members of your team that you’ve updated the workspace, and ask them to review, comment, or edit the page.

Before when you wanted to share work with your team, you had to wait for them to receive wiki notifications. If you wanted immediate feedback on your work, you had to copy the URL and paste it into an email. (What a waste of time!)

Now use the “Send a link” feature to immediately share your work and ask for feedback. Here’s how:

When you’re done updating the page, click ’send a link’

Add a short explanation and send to any member of the wiki.

The “Send a link” feature makes it easy to collaborate on specific pages and share page drafts between your team.

How will you use this feature? Tell us in the comments!

When we created PBwiki 2.0 one of the most important new features was the addition of folders. Folders allowed you to create specific sections on your wiki to organize pages and navigate to other pages in that folder.

We heard from many of you that folders were great, but you wanted an easier way to access content from other folders or even pages that weren’t in folders.

We heard you! Today we’re excited to introduce The Navigator, a new way view the pages and files of any folder and quickly jump to a specific page. The Navigator also gives you a quick way to locate your Starred Pages.

View all of your folders and starred pages

Click on the folder to view all pages and files

The Navigator will make it much easier to find all the pages and files on your wiki. Here’s what our Alpha Team users have to say:

“The Navigator is a great feature! I will definitely use it in my wikis, because it adds order, speed and convenience to seeing where things are.” – Larry B

For more details on how to use The Navigator, check out our user manual.

As a wiki grows, it becomes increasingly difficult to find and track the pages and files that matter most to you. For the last several months, we’ve been researching and designing a new way to organize and share information on your wiki.

Starred pages- Bookmark all important wiki pages and create a personal list of information that is important to you.

Selective Notifications- Tailor notifications to monitor only your starred pages. Stay up to date, automatically and avoid notification overload.

Navigator- Quickly navigate to any folder, and browse all pages on your wiki. The Navigator also gives you a quick way to view your Starred Pages.

Send a link- Tell other members of your team that you’ve updated the workspace, or to call them to review, comment, or edit the page.

We’ve already heard some awesome feedback about these features:

“Notification is the killer feature in this update. The idea that I can create/modify a page, then proactively notify all team members (or specific ones) that they have an action to perform is a great time-saver. We use PBwiki to manage workflow, and this make it a much more valuable tool.”

What do you think about this release? We’d love to hear from you!

Yes it’s been a long time coming but today we’re thrilled to announce — PBwiki now comes with spell check!

To double check your spelling, click on the spell check icon in your toolbar (beside the plugin icon). All misspelled words will be underlined with a dotted red line. Right click on the word to view suggested spellings.

We love feedback, let us know what you think!

Do you have content on your wiki that needs to be displayed consistently on multiple pages? We have build the ultimate plugin for you! It’s called ‘Include another Page’ and it’s available in your plugin menu under PBwiki Magic.

This plugin lets you embed the content from one wiki page onto another wiki page and lock it in place.

Here’s an example:

Your company has several key guidelines that must be followed for all projects. Instead of trying to remember these guidelines or search around to locate them, just post them to a wiki page.

For your next project, include your guidelines page on the project planning page so you make sure to follow them.

Here’s how:

Create the content you want displayed across multiple apges: From our examples you would post your guidelines and hit save.

Include the content from one page on a different page: Use the plugin ‘ Include another page’ to display the information from your guidelines page. Plugin –> PBwiki magic –> Include another page

Display your content across multiple pages:Hit save and view the content from your guidelines page on your project planning page.

Instead of manually inserting the content on each page, which can lead to errors if the content ever needs to be changed, this plugin takes the content of a page and instantly inserts it into your wiki.

The included content is locked, you are not able to edit content that is pulled from another page. If you want to change the content across all pages, simply edit the information on the first page – in our example, the guidelines page.

Head to our manual to learn more information about the new ‘Include Another Page’ plugin, and all the other plugins available for your wiki.

The National Basketball Association has finally reached the quarter pole of the 2008-2009 season meaning that teams have played about 3/4s of their total games.  At this point, it’s pretty easy to tell which teams have a chance of winning the championship and which teams are already dreaming about next year.

The Boston Celtics is one such team that is vying for a championship.  Lately, they’ve been in a slump due to the injury of one of their best players, Kevin Garnett.  With Garnett’s influence, the Celtics are the class of the league, without him they are just another “very good” team.  Like most NBA superstars, Garnett is blessed with supreme athletic ability, willpower and drive.  However, what the team misses most when Garnett doesn’t play is his ability to communicate during the game.   Garnett keeps his team working as one cohesive unit with his incessant chatter and masterful communication skills.

It’s interesting to note that on a team full of world class talent, it takes a strong devotion to communication in order to achieve the next level.  This holds true in many situations, whether it is a basketball game or the execution of corporate strategy.  At PBwiki, we strive to make that communication easier and more effective.  Check out some of the ways that other organizations have utilized our tools.

Our goal is to provide a fantastic free product to everyone and affordable pricing to users who want additional access control, security features and customization.

We created our three tiered pricing in 2006 based on single wikis – Silver ($9.95/month), Gold ($24.95/month) and Platinum ($99.95/month). These package were designed for users to upgrade their family, classroom or department wiki.

In the past year we began seeing holes in the current pricing offered to our users. The Gold, Silver and Platinum packages were just not cutting it. Platinum features were too expensive for classroom teachers – even gold packages stretched school budgets. Our corporate clients who wanted more than one premium wiki were limited by per-wiki pricing and the lack of multi-wiki packages.

To answer these concerns, we’ve updated PBwiki pricing.

Just like our old pricing, everyone always has access to a free basic wiki. Pricing for educators has been dramatically reduced – premium academic wikis have all the features of platinum wikis at 1/10th of the cost. Businesses are now able to buy multi-wiki packages based on users and not wikis.

Here are our new prices:

Basic Edition wikis are always free – We’ve improved our free plan to include 20x more storage, 9 color schemes and wiki-level access controls (formerly $100/year). Basic wikis can be public or private and have unlimited users.

The Professional Edition for business users start at $8/user/month and has access to all premium features, including page-level access controls, unlimited storage, and single sign-on for Active Directory/LDAP integration. The Professional plan allows you to create unlimited custom-designed wikis – just pay per user. Use it for free with up to 3 users, for as long as you like.

Professional Plus Edition for business users is $11/user/month. The enterprise plan for business customers. All users get instant, round-the-clock access to our team of support gurus day and night with 24/7/365 live chat and email support.

Educators can always use the basic wiki or upgrade for specific classroom features:

Academic wikis are less expensive – $99/year. Educators and Librarians can always use the free Basic Edition. For those educators who want access controls, unlimited storage and full customization, one academic wiki costs $99/year for up to 100 users.

Campus Edition – unlimited premium wikis for your school, district or university $799/year. Schools can now buy unlimited premium wikis for up to 1,000 students. (That’s unlimited for the price of 8 wikis!!!!). Baltimore County Public Schools had amazing success rolling PBwiki out to over 103,643 students and 8,850 classroom teachers. We want all schools to afford this opportunity.

To recap: Everyone always has access to the improved Basic Edition. Education pricing has decreased and business customers can now purchase multi-wiki packages for a per-user price.

Let us know what you think, we love your comments.

Image from www.collider.com/

The A-Team is a group of outspoken PBwiki experts who test out all of our newest features and let us know what they think. This year we’re looking for a few more people to join the team.

This is a great chance for you to look under the hood at what we’re developing at PBwiki and affect the way it works.

This offer is not for the meek or faint of heart! You’ll be swimming in uncharted waters, trying out brand new features as we develop them. Things might change drastically, or maybe there will be bugs. We count on our Alpha Testers being there to help us find problems that we don’t see here, on our own computers.

If you’re an experienced PBwiki user who wants to test out the latest features and tell us what you think, sign up for the PBwiki Alpha Team.

Join the PBwiki A-team

01/27/09 3:06 PST
Hi everyone,

Some folks are experiencing read-only access and aren’t able to edit their wiki pages. Our engineers are aware of the problem and working on it.

Your data is safe and should be accessible asap. For up to the minute details, you can follow our updates on twitter at @PBkrissy

-Kristine

01/27/09 3:30PST
Hi again,

Your wiki and all of your data is once again accessible – both to view and edit. We tracked down and fixed a problem that was causing an infinite loop in our servers.

We’re sorry to have experienced slight downtime during your work day.

- Kristine