Kate's dashboard

Hi there!

This has been listed as a feature request, and I've added your feedback.

Thanks for checking in on this.

Did you fix this yet?

They actually only have to create one PBwiki Account ever, and then they have access to every wiki to which they are invited. So your model is exactly how it works!

Would simply making your wiki public (so that anybody can see it) be a problem? This would allow anybody to see your CV, course syllabus, etc. If there are private files, those could be given individual page permissions or folder permissions.

I am thinking of a way to make interactions with customers easy. If they have to create a new account for every wiki that they want to get to, that's pretty daunting if they use the site for anything else. Why wouldn't they have one user name and password period, with permissions set by the system to let them into whatever wiki they are joining/using/invited to.

I read the longer discussion and think I get the point. Interesting how I have to try to imagine how others use a wiki. . . And I guess my uses are just that much different from the ones you have cited.

I don't want the wiki to be used as an interactive space so much as to have it be an easy place to showcase documents -- to create a course portfolio for other teachers to be able to look at how a course is structured. Using a wiki, I can update and revise assignments easily, share them with fellow learning community teachers (and they can post theirs, too. . . and ditto for the revising). But aside from the work of a small group of people on the site, the purpose is to showcase the course. For that, we need easy access for people NOT expected to do anything but perhaps comment. So we want to invite people who fit neither of your above categories. Just VIEWERS. And they surely don't want to have to create an account just to see our wiki. I think, tho, that my invitations DO allow people just to pop on and look at what we have wrought. Even without a password or a wiki account.

I'd also like to use a wiki to create an online curriculum vitae. I could link to every paper I published, I could post course syllabi etc etc. What a great idea! But if I applied for a grant, a scholarship or a new job, I'd have to be able to tell strangers to come look at it. Will that be a problem with 2.0? (because the beta site was where I thought to work on that project.)

One of the major concerns with PBwiki 2.0 was that you could never figure out who contributed what to a wiki, and thus PBwiki accounts was born. You only have to create one account ever for every PBwiki page you visit, so it's not as intrusive as it sounds, and for people who use a lot of PBwiki wikis, it means they can have a list of all of them at their fingertips.

We do realize that this presents an awkward situation for those more open situations where either (a) you need to make it as easy as possible to go in and edit, regardless of whether you know who's doing it OR (b) you have students who don't have email addresses. Because of feedback like your's, we're working hard to bring back a useful form of the old invite key/password that doesn't confuse people with too many login options.

A much more in-depth discussion can be found here:
http://getsatisfaction.com/pbwiki/top...

Thanks for using PBwiki and trying out 2.0!
Vu

Ah, but I want to invite people who DO NOT have pbwiki accounts to view my wiki. Why would everyone visiting a wiki create an account on pbwiki? Isn't that like having to create an account every time you visit a webpage? I would like to use my wiki as a kind of webpage. . . and would like a wide readership of non-wiki users.

Could invitations include a name with the e-mail address that would then show up on the sidebar where it indicates who visited?

If you're inviting people to a 2.0 wiki, they should be logging in with their PBwiki Account. If their names aren't showing up, make sure they go to their Account homepage at http://my.pbwiki.com and they update their profile to reflect their real names (there's a profile tab).

Hope that helps!
Vu

I was looking for a way to change the width of a column, but this explanation didn't work for me. First, it's not intuitive to change the cell properties of a single cell to change the width of an entire column. When I tried it, the view in the editor didn't change, which is disconcerting, but when I saved the page, it seemed that the widths of all the columns had changed proportionally. Not what I wanted.

The above information was helpful, but there is another key feature missing. While using a table...or an embedded spreadsheet, changes cannot be made on groups of cells. This feature would match how many people use tables and spreadsheets. Try to change the background color on a row of cells. Try to copy a group of 2x5 cells to move them over one column...you have to do each cell on its own. This makes the tables and spreadsheets rather difficult to use unless you've already created the content outside of the wiki. With this feature, tables and spreadsheets would be more useful in collaborative updates.

It typically happens due to discrepancies between what the editor puts in the page, and then the CSS definitions for the page, which are skin specific and overlay everything else. This is usually the case when something is undefined, such as a block of text for which you have set no font or size. That will revert to the default for the given skin.

Generally speaking, if you explicitly define a font and size, that should stick.

There isn't anything in the "works" at this moment. We will provide better support for Word in the future.