If you’re still on a PBwiki 1.0 wiki, you’ve probably received an email recently about updating to PBwiki 2.0. Beginning on March 9th, 2009, all 1.0 wikis will automatically update to 2.0.

Don’t worry — you have plenty of time to make the change (a free update, which takes less than 5 minutes), plus we’ve got an excellent support team waiting to help you.

When we launched PBwiki in 2005, we designed our system to be easy to edit and share. Now, 4 years later, our users have taught us a lot. You’ve told us that you want more control over users, more powerful editing/sharing features, and an improved user interface.

In 2008, we rolled out PBwiki 2.0 to address those needs. A year later, we’ve concluded that for just about every usage, PBwiki 2.0 works better than 1.0 for collaborating and sharing information. 2.0 even gives you new features like Classroom Accounts (which allow educators to invite students without email addresses) and Document Management.

Updating to 2.0 does mean learning a different user interface, but the folks who’ve made the switch will tell you it’s worth it:

Finally upgraded my pbwiki site to 2.0. why did i wait so long to do this! wow! – starryhope01

I have used PBwiki for 2 graduate courses with the same students. All of us like the PBwiki 2.0 over the earlier version. This version feels more intuitive and allows me to break the class into groups with their own work areas (folders). -Jane Allgood, Ph.D.

You can use a simple wizard to update to 2.0 (again, it’s free and takes about 5 minutes). You will not lose any content by updating to 2.0, and with Classroom Accounts (which replace invite keys), reader comments, folders, easier editing, full CSS customization, and so on, PBwiki 2.0 allows you to do just pretty much everything you could with PBwiki 1.0 and more.

You can update to 2.0 at any time, or you can wait until March 9th, and we’ll update for you.

To update to PBwiki 2.0, go to WIKINAME.pbwiki.com/migration.php (just replace WIKINAME with the name of your wiki) and follow the instructions on screen!

Today we’re excited to announce an even easier way to customize your PBwiki pages.

In the past if you wanted to remove static elements from the page – like the comment box or the sidebar – you had to use custom CSS. This was a pain for many reasons – you had to know CSS, even then your CSS code might not work in all browsers and it was hard to create default settings for your page.

Our new customization settings makes it super easy to design your wiki pages – and you don’t need custom CSS. Now you can:

• Display your comments in reverse chronological order or remove the comment box entirely.
• Remove header, footer and contact forms from your wiki.
• Chose what elements are available on the side panel – remove the sidebar, folders and recent wiki activity.

Note: If you remove the comment box, existing comments will be saved but not visible on the page.

To add custom settings to your wiki, go to Settings —> Advanced Settings —> Customization. This feature is available on all premium wikis.

Feedback?
We love feedback! Let us know how you will customize your wiki!

Do you present about technology and show others how to use a wiki?

We want to say thanks for spreading the word!

For you thousands of presenters, we’ve developed materials that make your job easier – the PBwiki Presenter Pack. This is a free virtual presentation guide that include videos, how-to guides, a free tee-shirt AND three free premium wikis!

Who can apply for a PBwiki Presenter Pack? This program is designed specifically for educators, instructional technologists, and folks in the non-profit field.

Already over 2,000 people have applied for and received their free wikis. If you’re presenting at an upcoming conference, or just showing a group of co-workers how to use a wiki, you can apply for the PBwiki presenter pack.

Apply for your presenter pack today!

12/31/08, 7pm PST: Some wikis are experiencing slow page loads and 500 errors when wiki pages attempt to load. Our engineers are aware of the problem and working on it.

There is no data loss and we estimate a relatively quick repair of the problem. We apologize for the inconvenience and wish you a Happy New Year’s! We’ll keep you updated here.

7:03pm: Our engineers have put a fix in place to repair most of the problems. We’re continuing to monitor page loads, but anticipate that most operations work smoothly again. Have a happy holiday!

This week we’re excited to release one of our most requested features – Reader Commenting. Before,wiki users with ‘Reader’ access were only allowed to view your wiki.

Now, you can enable Readers to leave comments.

Why reader comments are useful

The ability for readers to leave comments is great if you like to get input from everyone in your organization, but you don’t want to give them full access to edit other pages on your wiki.

Reader comments are also useful for classrooms. Teachers can post questions on a page and have students answer them without having the ability to edit the questions.

How we keep your wiki safe with Reader commenting

Note: To keep your wiki safe, only users who have been invited as readers are enabled to comment. Visitors to public wikis won’t be able to leave comments unless they’re added to the wiki as readers

If you already have a wiki, you’ll need to enable this feature by doing this: Go to Settings —> Wiki Security —> Uncheck the ‘Disable reader commenting’ box.

New wikis will have Reader Commenting enabled by default.

How are you going to use reader commenting? Tell us in the comments!

You can already easily insert YouTube videos and Google Gadgets into your wiki using the Plugin menu (click Edit >> Insert plugin).

Now, we’ve made it easier to extend your wiki by inserting HTML and JavaScript into your wiki.

Use HTML/JavaScript to add outside widgets to your wiki

Custom HTML/JavaScript allows you (or your admins) to add interactive elements — also known as widgets — to your wiki pages.

Examples:

• Forms you create from Wufoo
• Slideshows from Flickr
• Any other widget with embeddable code!

Included: Security options for administrators

Widgets can sometimes result in unexpected behavior, so we’ve included built-in security for this feature (learn more about PBwiki security).

If “Allow JavaScript and other potentially unsafe code” is checked, only wiki admins will be able to edit the plugin in the future.

When other wiki users edit the plugin, they will not see the checkbox. If potentially unsafe code is detected, a warning will be shown. Potentially unsafe code, such as JavaScript, is automatically removed from the plugin to help keep your wiki safe.

To use the HTML/JavaScript plugin

1. Go into edit mode on your wiki by clicking the “Edit” tab.
2. Click the “Insert Plugin” button
3. Choose “PBwiki Magic”
4. And then choose “HTML/JavaScript”
5. Type in your code
6. If you’re a wiki administrator and want to include JavaScript (”script”) or CSS (”style”), check “Allow JavaScript and other potentially unsafe code”
7. Click “Preview,” then “OK,” and now “Save” your wiki page.

And if you have any questions, please check out the PBwiki Manual on Custom HTML / Javascript.

Image from directsnapfootball.com

I spent most of Sunday afternoon at home watching various football games. While I’m a fan of all sports, I’m always amazed at the execution and synchronization of a typical football play. Each down, the 11 players move in perfect harmony in order to reach their goal. The slightest misstep can be the difference between victory and defeat.

What is true on the football field is often true in real life: if a team isn’t on the same page, the team is likely to fail. Football players spend hours reading a playbook and practicing over and over again in order to attain this togetherness. In the business world, we don’t have time to practice for hours which makes having a good playbook essential. If your team doesn’t have a playbook, why not build one today using a wiki?

I’m curious how you invite others to your wiki. We’ve heard from users who describe their wiki in all different kinds of ways.

What do you say to get others to successfully join your wiki?

Is it:

“Hey Michelle, you should join my wiki. You can edit pages with me on it…”

-or-

“John, you should try my PBwiki. We can keep our files in one place….”

-or-

“We should just use my PBwiki instead of sending all these emails back and forth.”

You get the idea…what words do you use to describe your wiki so others will join? Leave us a comment with your best invitation — and please include your profession!

I joined PBwiki last month as the first web analyst on the team.  One of my key roles here is to analyze how people interact with their wikis so that we can craft our products and services to best meet your needs.

We can monitor PBwiki to see what’s working and what’s not
One of the greatest facets of having a “software as a service” (SaaS) model is that we have an on-going relationship with our users and can observe how they interact with our product.  Compare that to the standard shrink-wrapped software model, where the vendor sells the product and then disappears from the customer’s sight until they want to sell an upgrade.  The benefit, of course, of us knowing how you are using our product, is that we can enhance the product to better suit your needs.

Case study: How many users use Document Management functionality?
Before the new features
As a concrete example of how PBWiki analyzes user behavior to improve the value of our product, let’s look at our new Document Management capabilities.  On any given day earlier in October, roughly 35% of active wikis were uploading files (see table 1).  This adoption rate indicates that you find document management useful and that we need to focus product development effort on it.  But at the end of the day, this number doesn’t give us much guidance in terms of what direction to take this feature.  To make any decisions regarding the product, we also had to look closely at qualitative data.  The quantitative data (i.e. the 35% adoption rate) lets our product team know what you’re doing, but the qualitative data lets us know why you’re doing what you’re doing.

Table 1 – Pre-feature enhancement adoption rate

After we released Document Management
After analyzing the qualitative data (e.g. user feedback), we realized the need for several new features (including access control), implemented them, and pushed them live near the end of October.  So, how do we know if these new features were useful?  We monitored the adoption rate and saw it jump over 10% (see table 2)!  The upshot of this example is that at PBwiki, we listen to our users so that we can build the best products to solve their needs.

Table 2 – Post-feature enhancement adoption rate

Web analytics and your privacy
We take your privacy seriously at PBWiki.  As a reminder, the non-binding English summary of our privacy policy is

• If you mark your wiki private, we’ll keep it private.
• We don’t share personally identifiable information with others.
• We hate spammers, too. We’ll try not to bug you with email.

During any analysis, I will be sifting through the 1 billion events that our users have generated over the past few years.  Because of the immense size of our data set, I work with anonymous and aggregate data.  In the analysis of Document Management above, I included over 100,000 wikis and at no point did I need to drill into the specific details of any one wiki or user.

What kind of data would you like to see?