Tag Archives: New features for educators

New Feature – Navigate and organize your wiki

31 Mar

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
navigator

Click on the folder to view all pages and files
nav2

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.

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Introducing the new Settings Panel on all 2.0 wikis

19 Aug

Yesterday, we rolled out a new settings panel for all PBwiki 2.0 wikis, making it easier to control the settings on your wiki.
New PBwiki Settings Panel

See details about the new settings panel.

(Note: Don’t miss out on new features! We’ll be releasing new features for 2.0 wikis, so if you haven’t converted to PBwiki 2.0 yet, please click the “Convert now” banner at the top of your wiki to update for free. If you don’t see the banner, 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.)

And let us know what you think!

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New feature: Email notifications look better, work better

16 Jun

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.

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PBwiki 2.0 Preview: Folders

16 Jan

[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.)

add-page-to-folder.png

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

folder-settings-add-user.png

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!

navigate-by-using-folders.png

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.

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Here's how to get the improved PBwiki Sidebar — free

28 Oct

[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:
pbwikiother2.png

The improved sidebar looks like this:
kamtriesagain-wiki.png

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.)

pbwikiexample-allpages.png

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.pbworks.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 this out great solution by one of PBwiki community members.

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