PBwiki now supports footnotes. Whether you’re using PBwiki for research, collaborative writing, or organization, there are always lots of little details that you need to keep track of — places where sticking little snippets of text and references would be handy. Here’s a quick sample:

To insert a footnote: Click Insert Plugin >> PBwiki Magic >> Footnote. Insert as many footnotes as you need.

This feature works for PBwiki 1.0 and 2.0. Please let us know what you think! Feedback is always welcome.

When PBwiki 2.0 launched, it included lots of great new features, but one thing stayed exactly the same: the notification emails you got when somebody changed a page on your wiki.

We fixed that today — here is a sneak preview of the new version of notifications.

The new notifications…

• Let you see all changes made to your wiki
• Have shorter change logs, and are easier to read
• Respect your notification settings
• Won’t be marked as spam!

To get a sneak preview of these new notifications, go to your wiki settings and check the box that says “Sneak preview new version of notifications”

Keep in mind that they’re not quite done yet, so if you have any problems, just turn off the sneak preview (and be sure to send us feedback). Enjoy!

One of the strongest pieces of feedback we’ve gotten is to improve our editor.

Good news — PBwiki 2.0 includes a new editor that makes using your wiki far easier. I’ve been using it internally and it’s fantastic.

Click to enlarge

What does the new editor include?

• Better handling of bullet points and numbered lists.

• Better handling of line spacing and fonts.
• “Much more WYSIWYG-ness.” (That’s straight from our Director of Engineering.) Edit mode will look much more like the final version.

When we launched our Point-and-Click editor a year ago, we noticed a quick upsurge in our usage. The easier it is to edit, the more people use PBwiki. So among our other new features, We’re very excited to show you the new editor.

Golden Tickets: Get beta access to PBwiki 2.0
We have a limited amount of Golden Tickets to try out PBwiki 2.0 as a beta user. If you’re interested in trying out PBwiki 2.0 and giving us feedback, sign up for PBwiki 2.0 beta access.

[See our past Previews of PBwiki 2.0: Folders, Page-level access and an Overview of PBwiki 2.0.]

[See our past Previews of PBwiki 2.0: Page-level access and Overview.]

Organizing your wiki becomes important as you add more and more content. In PBwiki 2.0, we’ve improved navigation with better search, improved tagging, and page folders.

Today, I’m going to cover page folders in PBwiki 2.0.

When it comes to PBwiki organization, there are a couple of major issues:
1. Organizing lots of pages is difficult on PBwiki right now (have you ever wondered, ‘Where did that page go?’)
2. There are often many different users on a wiki — and they don’t care about all pages, they just care about their pages

As a result, we’ve created folders within PBwiki 2.0.

Imagine you invite your colleague from your marketing team to your PBwiki. Wouldn’t it be great if there were a central place — within the wiki — for all the marketing pages?

In PBwiki 2.0, you can add any page to a folder. (Use an existing folder or create your own.)

And just as PBwiki 2.0 features page-level access, it also features folder-level permissions.

Folders are useful for:

• Creating specific sections on your wiki to organize pages

• Creating specific sections on your wiki with custom permissions
• Making your wiki easier to navigate!

Golden Tickets: Get beta access to PBwiki 2.0
We have a limited amount of Golden Tickets to try out PBwiki 2.0 as a beta user. If you’re interested in trying out PBwiki 2.0 and giving us feedback, sign up for PBwiki 2.0 beta access.

[See our past Previews of PBwiki 2.0: Overview]

We’ve received hundreds of notes from users who want to control access to specific pages on their wikis. We’re happy to announce that PBwiki 2.0 will include page-level access. Today we’re taking you on a preview tour of how page-level access controls will work.

In PBwiki 2.0, each page has a tab with relevant information, including “Page security.”

A closer view

By default, pages have the same security settings as the rest of your wiki (if your wiki is private, your pages will be private).

New! Administrators can override default security and choose who has access to specific pages.

Here, you select from a list of your wiki’s users and assign them the appropriate level of access. Note that we’ve slightly changed the levels of access to “Reader,” “Writer,” and “Editor.” (We’ll cover our new individual logins in an upcoming preview post.)

Why is this useful?
When we started PBwiki, we didn’t see the need for detailed access controls. But as we’ve grown, we’ve been hearing from users who want controls over who can access specific pages. Sometimes they want to add access, like inviting someone outside the company to one specific page (without exposing the rest of the wiki). Other times, they want to restrict access, such as preventing engineers from seeing marketing plans and having a premature heart attack.

By adding page-level access, you can control exactly who sees your content. This feature will be released in some limited fashion for free users.

Examples of using page-level access

• A private business wiki. If you use a private wiki for business purposes, imagine managing your external vendors on your PBwiki. Create a page for each vendor and grant them access to that page only.
• An educational wiki. If you’re running a classroom PBwiki, you may want to limit certain students to certain pages. Take your syllabus, for example — it may be different for your 3rd-period and 6th-period English classes. Use page-level access to restrict students to their appropriate page. Or create a page for each student and let them upload their homework directly to the page.
• A personal wiki. I have a private wiki with various projects, and I’d love to be able to invite others to participate. But until now, I couldn’t, because they’d be able to see private information I have (like account numbers and passwords). Now, using page-level access, I can create specific pages and invite outside people to have access to that page only.

Coming up: More previews
Stay tuned for more previews on new features like individual logins and folders.

Golden Tickets: Get beta access to PBwiki 2.0
We have a limited amount of Golden Tickets to try out PBwiki 2.0 as a beta user. If you’re interested in trying out PBwiki 2.0 and giving us feedback, sign up for PBwiki 2.0 beta access.

This is the first preview of a major release we’re working on for early January 2008.

We’re working on a completely new interface with brand-new features:

• New editor. We’ve improved the editor to be more responsive and have fixed a number of bugs. (My personal favorite: Bullet-pointing is now much, much easier.)

• Page-level access. If you’ve ever wanted to allow certain people access to specific pages on your wiki, now you’ll be able to.
• Page folders & folder access controls. This new feature will allow you to put pages in folders to better organize your wiki. A godsend for large wikis!
• Improved logins. A few months ago, we noted how logins on PBwiki are more confusing than they need to be. In the new release, we’ll be improving logins and making it easier to track who’s doing what — and to make sharing easier.

Beginning in early 2008, we’ll be sending you information about how to migrate over to the new interface. (If you don’t want to change, you can keep your current interface.)

Here’s a preview screenshot.

Golden Tickets: Get beta access to PBwiki 2.0
We have a limited amount of Golden Tickets to try out PBwiki 2.0 as a beta user. If you’re interested in trying out PBwiki 2.0 and giving us feedback, sign up for PBwiki 2.0 beta access.

We’re excited about the new release and will keep you updated beginning in early 2008!

The easiest way to find all the pages in your wiki is by clicking “Show all pages” at the bottom of your wiki (the middle box).

Today, we’ve made AllPages much easier to use.

Now you can easily see how many revisions each page has and you can quickly delete unwanted pages.

To see the new AllPages, click “Show all pages” at the bottom of your wiki (or visit http://YOURWIKI.pbwiki.com/AllPages).

[Update, 11/1/07]: Clarified this post.

Now everyone can use our improved Sidebar. This Sidebar lets you have three tabs:

• QuickStart: A list of simple actions to help people get accustomed to using PBwiki.

• Recent Activity: A list of recent changes on the wiki.
• SideBar: The regular Sidebar page, which is fully-editable. Most people use this to create a simple navigation tab for the wiki.

Here’s how it looks.

The classic side bar looks like this:

The improved sidebar looks like this:

How to get the improved PBwiki Sidebar
Log into your wiki and click Settings —> Skins—> click “activate new sidebar.” (NOTE: This option will only appear for one month, so make your change now!)

How do I delete some of the tabs?
To delete any of the sidebar tabs, click “All Pages” and find the page(s) you want to delete (QuickStart, Recent Activities and SideBar). Click the red “+” next to the appropriate page and click Delete. Once you do this, that tab on your Sidebar will disappear. (NOTE: Once a page is gone, all content on it will disappear, so be careful.)

I don’t like the “improved” Sidebar and I want to back to the old one.
Unfortunately, there’s no going back, so please be sure you want to switch before you do it. A quick way to play around with the new Sidebar is to create a demo wiki from http://www.pbwiki.com.

Help! I don’t have the option to turn on the new Sidebar in Settings >> Skin
We noticed a lot of questions below and dug into this. Chances are, you already have the new Sidebar. If this isn’t the case, please leave a comment with your wiki name so we can see what’s going on.

I want to force the Sidebar to appear instead of QuickStart
No problem. Check out this great solution by one of PBwiki community members.

Hey everyone, I’m excited about this new feature – it’s one that I will use often and I hope you will too.

We’ve have created a quick and easy way for you to create your own templates. A template allows you to easily replicate wiki pages from the same design or style. They save time because each wiki editor does not have to create the document format on their own.

Here’s how to create your own template:

Create a new page

Copy and paste your original template into the wiki

Tag your wiki page with the word template (in lower case). The tag feature is at the bottom left of your wiki (click on the +)

You will see your new wiki template when you create a new page

Do you have a template that you’re excited to use or think will be useful to other users?

Here’s an easy way to contact wiki owners. We recently added a new feature that lets anybody send e-mails to wiki owners without revealing owners’ e-mails directly. As an administrator, you can set this feature up, or turn it off entirely, in Settings on your wiki. Here’s how.

• Click Settings on any page. Log into your wiki if necessary.
• Simply change the settings under Contact E-mail. You can change the e-mail destination or hide the form entirely from your users.

The link to the contact form appears on the bottom of every wiki page and on the login page for private wikis. The form can be used to request access to private wikis, simply for comments, or for anything else. To protect the privacy of wiki owners, the owner’s e-mail address is never displayed.

• Choose Contact Wiki Owner from the login page, or from under Wiki Information on any wiki page.
• Fill out the form with your e-mail address and message.
• Click Send.