We just added a tiny sharing sidebar to each wiki. This should make it even easier to share your wiki with friends, colleagues, and anyone else that you want to start collaborating with on your wiki. The sharing sidebar is located beneath the normal sidebar, or, if you have one of the tabbed sidebars, it should appear at the bottom of the Quickstart tab.

Depending on your level of security, you will be given the option to share just a regular link to let others read your wiki, or, another link that will give them full access edit pages, and more. Those who have paid for advanced permissions will have greater control, too. Use these links in e-mail, blogs, chat conversations, tattoo it to your elbow, etc.

The sharing sidebar can be turned off in the admin panel (click “Wiki settings” on the bottom of your wiki).

Attention students: You now have one less excuse to use — “the wiki ate my homework” line is now history!

When working on a document in our Point-and-Click editor, we’ll automatically save a draft every 3 minutes. If your laptop runs out of battery, your cat closes your browser, or your new copy of Windows Vista crashes on you, no worries, you can now resume (close to) where you left off. We hope you will find this new feature useful and non-intrusive.

How does it work? Just edit your wiki as usual. If your browser crashes, resume editing and you’ll be prompted to resume the autosaved version.

Also, we built Autosave so drafts won’t clutter the Recent Changes or Wiki History.

The autosave feature is free for all PBwikis using the Point-and-Click editor.

We just launched the newest version of our Point-and-Click editor (formerly, our WYSIWYG editor) tonight. There are quite a few specific changes listed below, but there are also a number of other subtle changes which may lead you to think the editor “just works better� now.

• Due to popular demand, we’ve added a strikethrough button on the toolbar
• Line spacing should be more consistent – no more misbehaving ‘enter’ keys
• For those conscious about the HTML that is generated, you will be happy to learn that the editor will produce leaner, cleaner, code, especially with attachments

The best part is we aren’t stopping the improvements any time soon. We’ll be improving the speed of the new editor and improving the usability even more over the next few weeks.

Lots of people have requested an enhanced PDF export capability — our new team member Igor has been doing some great work adding features to this little gem of a feature. Top priorities for us are:

1) proper unicode support (for all those wacky citizens of the world)
2) proper handling of lists, especially nested lists
3) inlined images

I’ve done a first-pass integration of Igor’s improved code on our development servers, and have a screenshot to share. Expect to see more tweaking of the vertical spacing and formatting, with general availability in the next few weeks.

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!

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.”

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!