Brian Klug joins PBwiki as our javascript guru

Brian Klug is hardcore

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!

What (we think) educators want from PBwiki

We spent the last week talking to educators from around the country who told us what they wanted from PBwiki. Each call took about 30 minutes and we tried to really understand what’s working, and what’s not. Here’s some of the feedback we got.

  • Easier templates. We have some educational templates, but you want many, many more. What about using some of our existing educational wikis to get more templates? Better yet, what if we let you submit templates to be included PBwiki-wide?
  • Better examples. We need to show how other educators are using PBwiki successfully.
  • Make it easy to share. If you’re sharing your wiki with students, that should work differently than if you’re sharing it with parents.
  • No ads. You hate them. We hear you!
  • Lots and lots of FAQs. We need to help you get started, build your wiki up, and then share best practices with other educators.
  • Easier monitoring. Who changed what on your PBwiki?
  • Easier editing. We’re already on it (see screenshots of our new PBwiki editor).

We also asked general (non-PBwiki) questions about the challenges you face as educators. One of the most common responses was “keeping my students engaged.”

We’ve taken your feedback and made some new plans for PBwiki. Stay tuned for PBwiki to be even better for your classroom. And be sure to check out our new PBwiki editor — it’s coming soon.

If you have other suggestions for what you want to see in your educational wiki, please email us!

Welsh Translation!

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@pbworks.com. Thanks!

The Authentication API

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. 🙂

Premium users can get more features a la carte

We noticed lots of Premium users asking us how they could get additional features. It happened about 50 times, and then you should have heard the groans in the office. It went something like, “Dear god, how have we not already built this?”

Now Premium users can upgrade to specific a la carte features. Do you just want encryption? No problem. What about lockable pages and hideable pages? Sure. A bonus: If you’re a Premium user and you add an additional feature, it lasts for the lifetime of your wiki.

To add extra features to your Premium wiki, click “Settings” and then “Features.”

New feature: Save wiki page to PDF

We quietly rolled out a new feature that lets you save any wiki page as a PDF file. This might be really useful if you have a syllabus (print it out and give it to your class), a resume, a meeting agenda, or almost anything else.

To save your wiki page to PDF, look at the bottom-left box of your wiki for the “Save page as PDF” link. That’s it!