For the last several months, we’ve been researching and designing a new way to add users to wikis without email addresses — notably, K-8 students.

Today, we’re happy to announce a new feature, Classroom Accounts, which will let you add users without email addresses. In consultation with dozens of educators, we’ve created a system that makes it unbelievably easy to add your students to your 2.0 educational wiki.

First, I’ll show you a video of the feature. Then, we’ll go into detail using a short tour with screenshots.

Video overview of Classroom Accounts (0:43):

Classroom Accounts from PBwikiWebinars on Vimeo.

Now, let’s look closer at each of those screens to see how they work.

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In your new PBwiki 2.0 settings panel, you’ll see a small graphic to invite users without email addresses.

Enter in how many students need accounts and what permission level they should be assigned. Note that you should have a printer to complete setting up Classroom Accounts.

Type in your students’ names and we’ll automatically create student-friendly passwords. Don’t have time to enter all your students’ names? Just click “Continue” and we’ll automatically create usernames for you.

That’s it! Now click “Print” to print your usernames and passwords.

Here’s a view of the handy PDF so you can hand it to your students. We paid special attention to the design of the PDF to make it easy to cut and distribute. We also email you a copy of your new Classroom Accounts.

Q&A
Q: “I’m still on PBwiki 1.0. How do I switch to 2.0?”
A: If you haven’t converted to PBwiki 2.0 yet, please click the “Convert now” flag at the top of your wiki to update for free. If you don’t see it, please sit tight for a short time while we finish polishing a few features for your wiki. We’ll enable you to update to 2.0 as soon as possible.

Q: “I have PBwiki 2.0 but I don’t see this option. Where is it?”
A: This feature is enabled for educational wikis only. If you need to switch categories, please click “Help” at the top-right corner of your wiki and let our support team know. They’ll switch you over right away.

Q: “I have another question about Classroom Accounts.”
A: No problem. To get help, check out the PBwiki manual entry on Classroom Accounts.

Based on testing, we’ve heard some great feedback on this feature. If you’re an educator, give it a shot. And, as always, let us know what you think!

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Note: Attention educators! Are you interested in getting a free Gold Premium wiki (value: $250) for your classroom this year? Sign up to get an early look at the PBwiki Back to School Challenge.

Other feedback? Please let us know!

Right now the improved settings panel is being rolled out to all education wikis, all others will see this new setting next week (Aug 18, 2008).

Today wiki administrators will see an improved settings panel — with a new interface and easier navigation.

The new setting panel has three categories:

• Use the ‘Basic Settings‘ features to customize your wiki – change the color or upload your logo.
• Use the ‘Access Controls‘ to invite users, change your wiki’s security setting, or set request access.
• Use the ‘Advanced Settings‘ if you want to add custom CSS or modify your wiki’s API.

Feedback?
We love feedback! Please let us know what you think.

Mmm, dogfood. Here at PBwiki, we make use of our own product pretty extensively. And having used an internal PBwiki for some three years, we’ve accumulated a pretty large collection of material! This makes it ever more important that we be able to search it and find what we’re looking for. So we’ve dramatically overhauled (and improved) search.

You may have noticed when PBwiki search improved a few weeks ago, getting phrase search, boolean inclusion/exclusion, and filename matching. Well hold onto your pants, because you ain’t seen nothin’ yet.

Search has been dramatically restyled again:

• Information about who last edited a page and when
• Suggesting page names similar to your search query
• An adding helpful icons to the result list to let you quickly distinguish wiki pages from PDFs
• Giving up to 200 characters of “snippet” context (vs 80 previously)
• Ranking search results and interleaving results from wiki pages, discussions, and filenames
• Letting you drill down to only search pages with a given tag or in a certain folder

OLD Search:

NEW Search:

Coming very soon? The ability to search inside PDFs, Word DOCs, Excel files, PowerPoint, and more.

If you have feedback about this new feature, what you like and don’t, please chip in here and I’ll read every comment!

Have you ever wanted to re-arrange your Sidebar on the right side of your wiki?

At PBwiki, we just love adding new features. There are enough wiki jockeys here in at PBHQ that it guarantees we’ll have differing opinions on how things should work — that’s one of the reasons we work hard to fit lots of different workflows. We’re proud to announce that we just got a bit more flexible: you can now re-arrange the different modules in your sidebar in PBwiki 2.0.

If you don’t use folders, stick the list at the bottom. Use the invitation field a lot? Put it at the top. Take a look at this quick screencast to see how it works.

Draggable Sidebar Modules from PBwiki on Vimeo.

Note: If you’re still on PBwiki 1.0 and want to update your wiki to PBwiki 2.0, please visit http://www.pbwiki.com/2.

As your wiki grows, it becomes increasingly important to be able to search and locate your information. We’ve heard from many of you that PBwiki search just wasn’t cutting it.

Good news! We’ve improved PBwiki search and made it easier to find exactly what you’re looking for.

Use these familiar search commands to improve your results:

SEARCH	RESULTS
brown -cow	To find pages that contain “brown” but not “cow”
“Bay to Breakers”	The exact phrase “Bay to Breakers”
yellow green blue	Any of the words “yellow”, “green”, or “blue”

Also, search results are sorted by weight, which means that a page with a lot of the mention of the keyword will show up at the top of the list.

Feedback?
We love feedback! Click here to let us know what you think.

When the web was first conceived, it was intended to be a read/write medium. Right now, wikis are the best implementation of that vision: web pages that are easy for people to edit directly from their web browser.

Yesterday, we heard about the Universal Edit Button from a commenter on Get Satisfaction. When we looked into it, we thought it was a great idea: the Universal Edit Button is a Firefox extension that adds an “Edit” button right in your browser on pages that support it. We are happy to say that we now support this great idea, joining a growing number of wiki providers online. You’ll see it on all PBwiki 2.0 pages (PBwiki 1.0 will get it on Monday) that you have writer access to — it’s a pencil in a green square:

Right now, you have to have to be using Firefox to use the extension, but people are working on a version for Internet Explorer. Keep up to date at the official Universal Edit Button web site.

Today, we’ve enabled a new feature on your wiki: Request Access allows users to request access to your wiki.

Who would use Request Access?
It’s perfect if you want to add users to your wiki, but don’t want to manage the process of figuring out their email address, adding them, and managing them. You’ll still be able to add users to your wiki, but Request Access allows your users to make your life easier. Request Access is one of our core steps to making our login system easier to use.

How Request Access works
1. Someone wants to access your wiki (maybe you suggested they contribute)
2. They go to your wiki and click “Log in”
3. They’ll see a login page. Since they don’t have access to your wiki, they click “Request Access” and fill out some basic information
4. You’re sent an email with simple instructions on allowing the user wiki access (or ignoring them)

Screenshots
This is what your users will see when they try to log in to your wiki:

If they don’t have a username/password, they’ll be able to click “Request access,” which will take them to a page where they can identify themselves to the wiki administrator(s):

As the wiki administrator, you’ll receive an email that will allow you to grant access (or ignore the request).

…and they’re added to your wiki! No more wondering if you got the email address right or giving complicated instructions to log in to your wiki. Once you grant access, PBwiki handles the signup process in the background and lets you manage users from Settings >> Users.

As one of our beta testers said:

I love it. Since I’ve got a private wiki that we keep adding people to, previously I had to go and enter everyone in. I was never sure if I entered the right email.

[Request Access] makes logging in easier. First off, I get an email notification, so I don’t just get a random email from someone. I can just click on the link and approve! Hooray!

I like request access better than entering folks in individually.

Turning Request Access off
If you don’t want to allow users to request access to your wiki, you can always disable this feature by clicking Settings >> Security.

We love feedback!
Thanks for using PBwiki, and if you have any feedback, we’d love to hear it.

We’re happy to announce our improved notifications emails, which have new functionality and a brand-new visual design. We previewed these earlier, and today we’re launching these to all PBwiki 2.0 wikis. (Still on PBwiki 1.0? Click here to update your 2.0 wiki before everyone else.)

The new notifications include:

• Comment notifications. Your email notifications now include any comments made on your wiki.
• Better organized notifications. We’ve improved your email notifications so you’ll get a record of each change on your wiki in a more organized way.
• A new look and feel. I know my mom told me to be modest, but I can’t help myself — they look awesome!

Feedback?
We love feedback! Please let us know what you think.

We know our users are excited about making the switch to PBwiki 2.0, and we’ve been working on a tool that will allow our users to update their existing wikis to PBwiki 2.0. This tool is now ready and we’re looking for interested users to sign up, make the switch to PBwiki 2.0, and tell us what you think.

If you’re interested in trying this out, please click here to apply. We’re looking forward to hearing from you!

Note: Please don’t forget to check your email for a confirmation link!