Today we had a team meeting about improving PBwiki logins and access controls. This is something that is a top priority for us, and we’ll be working on it in phases starting immediately.

What to expect in the coming months
Better control over access on your wiki. You’ll be able to send certain pages to certain people, including groups of people (”Send this page to the engineering team”). For example, if you edited an agenda but only want marketing to get notified of the change (or the VP of marketing), you’ll be able to do that. You’ll be able to seamlessly add and remove access from your wiki using a simple interface.

Better visibility of who’s doing what. Our new system will let you easily see who changed what on your wiki. For example, if you add 20 people to your wiki, you’ll be able to see who’s confirmed their invitation and who’s edited a page.

Better handling of multiple wikis. Not much more to say about this except that it will be awesome.

Two examples
Let’s take two examples: Mr. Businessman and Mrs. Teacher.

Mr. Businessman is in charge of the wiki for his small company. He needs high security for his wiki — including an auditable trail of who changed what on the wiki, and IP locking so only people from his company can access the wiki (IP whitelisting is already available for business wikis). With these new features, he can say that Michelle changed the Meeting page on 8/10/07. He can have a full, printable record of changes. He is working on a draft and doesn’t want his manager to see it yet, so he hides it from everyone except his colleagues in marketing. He needs the marketing team’s input, so he gives them access.

Later, after it’s finished, Mr. Businessman will change the permissions so the CEO can see everything, the VP of Marketing can see all marketing materials, and his project manager can see relevant projects.

Mrs. Teacher has a classroom with 35 students and she uses PBwiki as a collaborative space for writing essays together, posting her syllabus, and letting the students collaborate. Using the new system, she’ll be able to import all of her students from an Excel/CSV file into her wiki and give them immediate access. She’ll also be able to see exactly who changed what on any page, including revoking access (or undoing a change). This is hardly ever a problem, but we know educators want to be sure about who’s changing what.

These changes will be slowly rolled in over the next few months, so keep your eyes peeled. We’ll keep you updated every step of the way. If you have feedback, leave a comment here!

-Ramit
Part of your PBwiki team

The PBwiki team is on our annual office offsite, and we’ve been spending lots of quality time together brainstorming about new product possibilities, ways to make PBwiki more useful to our users, and how to make PBwiki the obvious answer for your online collaborative needs. In addition to the longer-term strategic planning and such, we’ve also been doing some late-night hacking of ‘hey, you know what would be cool…’ features and enhancements — ideas we’ve had in our heads for a while but weren’t fleshed-out enough for prime-time or didn’t fit into the development schedule.

Tonight we’ve deployed the results of some kung-fu from last night, a new feature for premium wikis. All of your wiki’s pages are stored in memory, ready for display to you and to search through. While we’ve got a super-efficient distributed file storage for every page revision and attachment (millions!), it’s still on disks on remote machines. We’re restricting this to paying customers because it consumes by far the most expensive resource on our servers, RAM. There’s no downside for non-premium wikis and we’re not making them any slower. As we build out our server hardware we’ll make sure we have enough RAM to accommodate all of the premium wikis this way in addition to our normal caching mechanisms.

The result: Pages on premium wikis load 10-40% faster depending on size, and searches are up to 10 times faster. We’re pretty happy with the new speed boost, and think you will be too.

It’s been on our to-do list for a long time but now it’s good enough for general use — our PDF export feature now supports more interesting characters such as what you’d find, oh, anywhere in the world other than the US. We’ve also thrown in image embedding and some basic support for tables and hyperlinks. It turns out the PDF standard is pretty hard to do well, and we’ve been gnawing away at this matter for months. (Aside: guess what an ‘Acrobat error 135 is’ — we had to, it’s not documented) In order to fully support the kinds of html you can (and have) put in your wikis we’d have to basically rewrite the layout and printing engines of a web browser, and we’re not really equipped to do that right now. What we’ve come up with is a good balance between utility and scope — making it incrementally more capable would require a pretty substantial rework.

PBwiki has become a full-fledged platform with amazing third-party widgets that you can drop into your wikis. Here’s a demo video of how it works:

Click To Play

Just last week, we announced these new features.

Spreadsheets directly on your wiki (more info here)

Video upload to your wiki, or embedded from YouTube (more info here)

Event planning with the Eventbrite plugin (More info here)

Voice chat with the YackPack plugin (more info here)

Click To Play

Shared calendars on PBwiki (more info here) (scroll to the middle of the video)

And finally, the new beta of the PBwiki Installer, which lets you share Word documents right from MS Word. Phew.

Third-party widgetmakers and companies: We want you!
We’re now accepting submissions from third-party vendors to offer great widgets and apps for the PBwiki community. More information here.

For our users: Tell us what you want to see
We’re working to make PBwiki better and better for you. If there’s something you want to see, leave a comment here!

We’re announcing an awesome new feature today: voice chat on your wiki. You can talk to anyone (using voice) for free. This works for 1-20 people with no software download needed — and it’s ready to use today.

Watch the video below to see how it works:

Click To Play

What the video says:
We partnered with YackPack to bring voice chat to the PBwiki community. The Voice Chat plugin (also known as WalkieTalkie) brings live voice to your PBwiki pages. Everyone looking at the wiki page can hear your voice when you push down the “live� button and talk into your computer microphone. They can push the button and talk back. This makes it easier to collaborate with your team, classmates, or work group.

Insert the Voice Chat plugin on any PBwiki page, or you can put it in your sidebar (this makes it visible from all pages).

A very good use: You can leave your wiki page open all day and benefit from a “push to talk� voice connection. Any time you have something to say to your team, push the button and talk. It’s simple.

WalkieTalkie Widget . . .
* is free
* requires no installation or registration
* works on PC or Mac
* works anywhere in the world you have Internet
* connects your group with high-quality voice

The big news: You can use voice chat on your PBwiki today — free. Just insert the Voice Chat plugin by clicking Edit Page >> Insert Plugin >> Chat.

You can now embed spreadsheets directly in your PBwiki. Even better, you can edit the spreadsheets directly from your wiki!

We partnered with Numsum to let you import existing Excel spreadsheets, or to create your own. Give it a try.

To insert a spreadsheet on your wiki
Click “Edit Page” >> “Insert Plugins” >> “Productivity” and click Spreadsheet.

Or try inserting a sample spreadsheet in our sandbox
Play with the new spreadsheet plugin here: http://spreadsheets8.pbwiki.com

The big news: You can now insert live spreadsheets on your PBwiki — free.

Lots of people embed their YouTube videos using our Plugins (Edit Page >> Insert Plugins >> Video).

Today we’re announcing a new feature: Upload your videos directly to your PBwiki — free. If you have videos sitting around on your hard drive, upload them and share them with your friends. It takes about 5 minutes to upload.

When we decided to add video to PBWiki, we wanted it to be easy and look great. Working with the folks at Fliqz, we’ve added video functionality that turns any wiki into your personal primetime platform. What can you do with video? Here are 10 great ideas:

10: Show off your talent to the world

9: Share a recent experience with your network

8: Send a video message to someone you care about

7: Share videos of a family wedding, birth, or vacation

6: Invite your network to participate in a business or personal event

5: Create a video resume

4: Make a video review

3: Teach others how to do something (like make a great peanut butter sandwich)

2: Offer your views and opinions on a topic that matters

1: Demonstrate a product or a service

How to add video to your wiki
Just click “Edit Page” >> “Insert Plugin” >> “Video” and then insert your video. It will appear shortly afterwards. Remember, your video uploads do not use any of your wiki storage space.

The big news: You can upload video right to your wiki and share it with your friends — free.

Have you ever wanted to plan an event, coordinate RSVPs, and even sell tickets right from your wiki?

Lots of people already use their PBwikis to plan events (e.g., here and here).

Now, we’ve added a free feature to make event-planning easier. We partnered with Eventbrite, the leading online event registration service, so you can sell event tickets and collect registration information online. You can publish, promote, manage, and sell out your events with Eventbrite and PBwiki.

Watch the video below to see how easy it is to insert the Event Promoter plugin on your wiki.

(What the video says: To use the new feature, click “Edit Page”, Insert Plugin, and then hover over “Productivity” to “Plan an Event.”)

The big news: You can plan an event, coordinate RSVPs, and even sell tickets right from your wiki using the Eventbrite plugin — free.

[Update, 1/30/08: We've put this project on hold, so please disregard the blog post below.]

We just released a super-very-much-not-final beta of the PBwiki Installer at http://install.pbwiki.com.

Share Word documents through PBwiki
Want to collaborate on a Word document? Use the Installer to send files to PBwiki and collaborate with your co-workers. You can send your Word files to PBwiki in two ways:

1. In Word, just click File >> Send to PBwiki.

2. Use the dropbox to drag Word files to PBwiki. Just drag files to the dropbox and they’ll magically appear in your wiki.

Coming up: the ability to send documents to your wiki alone, improved notifications on your desktop, and a Mac version (depending on demand). David spent many late nights on this, so give it a shot!

Download the PBwiki Installer here.

For a while, we had temporarily halted wikis from being deleted to do some behind-the-curtain plumbing. Wiki delete works again. If you really want to delete your PBwiki (why would you want to?), just log in, click “Settings” and then click “Delete.”

Once it’s gone, it’s gone forever, so be careful!

Note: Once you delete a wiki, that wiki name will be retired / unusable forever.