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:

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!

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.