We’d love to hear what templates you want to see on PBwiki (e.g., plan a trip, run a group project, etc).

Also, if you’ve built a template and think it might be useful for others, we’d love to see it. We’ll keep an eye out and add the best template submissions PBwiki-wide for thousands of others to use.

Add / request a template at http://templates.pbwiki.com

Check out the image from Google Zeitgeist:

What will happen in 2007?

Currently, when creating a new wiki on PBwiki, one must choose between ‘Classic Editor’ and the ‘experimental WYSIWYG editor’. Depending on your answer, this enables (or not) our fancy new editor for that wiki. We’ve been receiving a lot of praise for the new editor (thanks guys!) as well as a few questions regarding continued support for our old interface that we would like to address.

As it stands now, there is no way to change editing style for a particular wiki. Once you create a WYSIWYG wiki, it can’t be edited in the classic “WikiStyleâ€? interface, and vice-versa.

We’re going to change that.

First and foremost, in January we will be giving all wiki administrators the ability to upgrade their wiki to WYSIWYG mode. There will be no charge for this upgrade!

Additionally, for those of you who just can’t get enough WikiStyle, you will also have the option of editing WYSIWYG wikis with our classic, WikiStyle editor. We can’t promise that all new WYSIWYG-specific features (like plugins) will be available, but you should still be able to use the same wiki markup that you have come to know and love.

As an aside, it is worth mentioning how we came around to this decision. The decision to maintain support for WikiStyle editing was greatly influenced by feedback from our users. We originally thought WYSIWYG would be the best option for everyone. But we sought feedback, mulled it over at lunch, and came to the conclusion that 1) we underestimated how much people like our classic interface and 2) Red Lobster’s cheese rolls are amazing. Listening to feedback is a big part of PBwiki, and drives a lot of the discussions here.

Stay tuned for more progress around WYSIWYG editing, and other new PBwiki features!

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!

There’s been a lot of discussion about the Peanut Butter Manifesto, in which Yahoo SVP notes that Yahoo is “spread too thin.” He also notes that he hates peanut butter.

Outrageous! Here’s our official response: In defense of peanut butter.

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!

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@pbwiki.com. Thanks!

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.

Hey, PBwiki-ers! It’s worth mentioning that the tags support that we rolled out this month across PBwiki was largely inspired by a series of wonderful meetings we had with Nitin Borwankar. This guy is like the Johnny Appleseed of the tagging world! If you need tags support in your application, talk with him and he’ll give you the know-how hookup.

Our rocking friends Jay & Ryan (vlogstars in their own right) came over to our new digs in San Bruno - we’re right by the SF airport, which is great, except for when the big planes come zooming overhead. Check out their awesome interview with our team!