Over the last couple of months, we’ve been making Wikispaces even more intuitive and effective for your daily work. You now have a more powerful tagging system, an easier to use File Upload tool, the ability to save your wiki pages as PDFs, and more.

According to one of our long-time users, Glenn Zucman of USC, Wikispaces’ improvements continue to impress: “I was just looking around and reflecting on all the new features since 2006. Wikispaces was really great then, and it’s so much more powerful, complete, and elegant now! Bravo!”

See for yourself. Check out each of these great new features:

• Tag Pages and Files for Easier Management
• More Easily Upload Files to Your Wiki
• Follow More Changes at Recent Changes
• Template a Wiki on Your Private Label Site
• Open Links in New Windows and Add Anchors to Your Page
• Turn Your Page or Wiki into a PDF
• Add References with the Visual Editor
• Resize Your Widgets

Like what you see? If you want to learn about upcoming improvements when they arrive, keep an eye on our Site Changes page and our blog .

You can now save and print all the hard work you do on your wiki as an elegant PDF to share with others. If you are planning a conference, collaborate with your colleagues on your wiki to put together that killer welcome pamphlet and then print it for all the participants. Or if you’re a non-profit, build training booklets on your wiki so that your international offices can print them out as a PDF to give to their volunteers.

To turn a wiki page into a PDF, go to the arrow on that page’s “page” tab. In that dropdown, click “PDF.” You can then save your page as a PDF on your computer for later or print it out right then. You can also convert your entire wiki into a PDF. To do this, go to “Manage Wiki” and “exports.” There you can set the type of export to PDF.

Produce elegant documents with our new PDF feature and take your wiki’s good looks to the streets.

Our new wiki template feature for Wikispaces Private Label lets you create wiki templates that your users can use when they create wikis on your site.

If you are creating e-portfolio wikis for each student, lower the barrier to getting started by giving each student a pre-structured wiki. Or, if you are setting up regional offices on your Private Label site, give each office a wiki pre-populated with all the necessary guidelines and documents.

To set up your wiki template,

1. Edit a wiki that you want to use as the template. Set the theme and permissions for the wiki and add any desired pages, links, or documents.
2. Go to “Site Administration” and then to the “wikis” tab.
3. From there, click “view and create templates.”
4. On this page, you can create a new template from the wiki you setup.

Now, when people create a new wiki on the site, they will have the choice to use your new template as a starting point.

If you are using wiki templates in your school or organization, we’d love to hear how. Feel free to send examples of how they are working for you along with any suggestions or feedback to help@wikispaces.com.

Our newest changes to our image and file upload tool let you more easily manage, sort, and locate your files. You can now:

• Upload your files easily with our more intuitive interface.
• Search for your files or images by name.
• Tag your files and then search for any files with that tag.

These improvements make it easier for you to organize and manage all the files and images on your wiki. You can separate files into groups and then search by group. As an educator, you can upload and tag assignments for your different classes so your students can find their own assignments easily. As a manager in a company, you can search for a specific expense report by employee and quickly find the one you need. If you haven’t uploaded a file or image recently, check out the cool new changes. Edit a page and click “Insert Images and Files” in the toolbar.

As always, we’d love your feedback on this improved feature. E-mail us at help@wikispaces.com with your comments.

Your “Recent Changes” page has a snazzy new look which allows you to better monitor and manage the activity on your wiki.

Whether you are just beginning your wiki or you’ve been actively using it for a while, Recent Changes has always been a great place to see the recent edits or discussion posts on your wiki. It lets you monitor the activity on your site, make sure you respond to a newbie’s discussion question, or get a bird’s eye view of the work happening among the ten different groups on your wiki.

With our recent improvements, you can now:

• Monitor changes to pages, files, tags, and membership on your wiki. On a Private Label site, you can also see recent wiki creations.
• More easily navigate your Recent Changes list and sort changes by type with our more intuitive design.
• Find more detail about a particular edit or post with our change summaries.

To view these changes, go to your wiki and click on “Recent Changes.” If you notice that someone has made a change to a page that you care about, you now won’t have to leave Recent Changes to see what they’ve done. Simply click on the gray text to the left of their username to view a summary of their changes. To hide this detail, click the gray text again.

Check out your Recent Changes and send us your feedback at help@wikispaces.com.

Our latest changes to the link tool will make it even easier to impress your colleagues with what your wiki can do.

You now don’t need to know any special code or tricks to have your links open in new windows. Simply edit your page and go to the “Insert Link” tool in the toolbar. Whether you decide to add a link to your wiki page or to an external website, you can click the “New Window” check box to have that link open in a new page in your browser.

You can also now easily add a link to any part of your wiki page with our link and anchor feature. An anchor is an invisible marker that you can place at any point on your page. You can then link to this marker from any page on your wiki, another wiki entirely, or even another website. This is useful when you want to direct your readers to a specific section of a page.

To set an anchor:

1. Edit the page and place your cursor at the section of the page you want to add the anchor to.
2. Click the “Insert Link” tool in the toolbar and go to the “Anchor” tab.
3. Enter a name for your anchor and click “Add Link.”

Your anchor is now on your page and you can link to it as many times as you’d like from wherever you like.

To link to an anchor:

1. Edit the page where you want to add the link.



2. Go to the “Insert Link” tool in the toolbar and then to the “Wiki Link” tab.
3. Type in the page name that the anchor is on and then click “Link to anchor?”
4. Type in your anchor name, add the link, and voila. You have just added a link to the exact section you want on your page.

Dive into these features, take more control over the navigation experience on your wiki, and wait for those “How did you do that?” exclamations from your friends.

Our references feature is now easy enough for anyone to use. Instead of using wikitext to cite your sources, you only need to point and click to have your references added to the page.

To add a reference note:

1. Edit your page and place your cursor where you’d like your reference marker to go.
2. Click on the “Embed Widget” tool in the toolbar.
3. Go to “Reference” and click on “Embed Reference Marker.”
4. Type in the text you’d like to appear in your footnote.
5. Save the reference and then save your page.

By default, references will appear at the bottom of the page.

1. Edit your page and place your cursor where you’d like your reference section to appear.
2. Go to the “Embed Widget” tool in the toolbar and then to “Reference.”
3. Select “Embed Reference Text” and then save your page.

Have your students give it a try as they cite sources for their next research paper, and let us know how it goes with an e-mail to help@wikispaces.com.

You can now resize and align your widgets in the same simple way you resize your images. You no longer need to struggle with that oversized calendar that creeps beyond the edge of your page or try to figure out how to make that poll sit to the left of your text. You can edit your widget without digging into code.

Say you’ve just embedded a video on your page and you want to make it a little bigger and have it sit in the middle of your page. How can you do that? Simple. All you need to do is:

1. Edit your wiki page.
2. Click on the video on your page.
3. A small pop-up box will appear allowing you to align or resize your video.
4. Select the changes you want and close the pop-up window.
5. Save your page to see how your newly-formatted video really brightens up your page.

It’s that easy.

So feel free to put widgets on your page, customize them, and give your page the look you want.

Join us at 4pm PDT today, September 15th for our monthly education webinar. We’ll show you some useful features for educators and introduce you to Cari Wilson.

Cari will be sharing several of her award-winning wikis with you, including an informational wiki about her home town and the 2010 Olympics at http://olympic-project.wikispaces.com and a virtual museum about ancient civilizations at http://elementsofcivilization.wikispaces.com/. Join us for the webinar and get some great ideas for your own collaborative wiki project.

For more information and to register for the event, visit: http://wikispacesineducation0909-2.eventbrite.com/. We look forward to seeing you there.

Maybe you’re an educator looking to set up a project for each student in your class and you would like each student to follow a similar format as they present their research. Or you’re a manager who would like your employees to fill out weekly expense reports on the wiki. Instead of formatting pages for each person or occasion, you can save time by using our page template tool.

To create a page template, go to “Manage Wiki” and “Templates.” There’s an option to either create a template from a blank page or from a page you have already built. You can edit your template further as you would any other wiki page. Once you save the page, your template will be created. You can edit it later by returning to “Manage Wiki” and “Templates.”

To create a new page from a template, click on “New Page.” Choose a name for your page and the template you would like to start from. Then all you have to do is click “Create” and you have your newly templated page.