Q: Can I hide the site-wide login area if we're not using site-wide accounts?

The way it works, if there are no site-wide user accounts created, the site-wide user login area on the front page will not appear. The exception to this is if you're logged in as site administrator; you'll see the login area, even if your users won't.

What may be showing up for your users is a message and link saying "New user? Register" which prompts them to create their own site-wide user account. To turn that off, go into the main site administration page, and deselect the checkbox labelled "Users can register themselves."

Q: Does signing in to a site-wide account give access to every forum on the site?

Site-wide accounts are one of the new features in version 6. They complement the existing login security tools, but do not replace them (or circumvent them!). Signing in with a site-wide account does not automatically give you access to anything you didn't have access to before. So how are they used?

If you have an existing group that is set up to use "individual accounts", normally you specify each account by providing a full name. If instead of providing a full name you put in an email address (matching a site-wide account), that will give the user access to that group. So essentially, it's saying that the user now has access, without us having to create a separate (per-group) account for them.

Q: I upgraded to version 6, and the comments areas were unlocked?!#?

In other words, there was a forum where some pages were locked and required a password to either edit them or post comments; before that password was entered, you wouldn't see the comments area. That was the way it appeared in 5.x, but in 6.0 that changed.

The reality is that it did and it didn't. In previous versions, both regular users and administrators were being asked to enter the lock password before posting. This was contrary to the idea that administrators have access to everything; they could certainly go into the edit page and start editing without needing to enter the lock password for example. So in that respect, there was a bug.

In version 6, with the bug fixed, administrators are allowed to post without a password. However, your regular users will not see the comment form, and will still have to enter the lock password to post. In other words, to them it will behave exactly as before. Logout as administrator and try it out.

One other small change in this area: when a page is locked, the edit page will have a message saying "This page is locked." Before, it wasn't easy to tell if the page still permitted comments to be posted without entering the password. Now if it does, you'll see "(Comments still allowed)" added to the message.

Patch Version 6.0.1.

While the overall response to version 6.0 has been very good, given the nature of introducing a major new component like the new editor, a number of bugs have come to light. Some of these seem to have only affected a few people, but some will affect more people. Full details below.

We'd recommend anyone on 6.0 upgrade to 6.0.1. Downloads on the pages for ProjectForum or CourseForum.

Of course, if you notice any other issues with this version, or have additional questions, please get in touch.

Bug fixes:

• Fix problem where bold and italic formatting entered in Safari wasn't being
  correctly converted to wiki markup
  
• Handle embedded non-breaking space characters inserted by the richtext editor
  in some browsers
  
• Render HTML blocks as the original HTML source in the editor, preventing some
  errors when opening and closing tags were in separate blocks
  
• Don't interpret custom links in the richtext editor
  
• Changes on Mac OS X to prevent Leopard's firewall breaking the application when
  set to restrict specific applications
  
• Administrative info links on directory page weren't being properly closed
  
• Indent/outdent are now available only for list items to facilitate nested lists
  
• Remove blockquote tags, replacing with nested lists where appropriate
  
• If the richtext editor fails to load, a link will be shown directing the user
  to the markup editor
  

Q: Is it possible to rename user accounts?

Not really.. it's basically just a delete and add. Any comment postings linked to the user's name in the wiki content wouldn't be changed in any case, since the comments are actually embedded in the page in wiki text.

Q: Can I run ProjectForum if my IP address keeps changing?

Normally, you would want to have a static IP address anytime you're running a server. But for a lot of home users, their internet provider doesn't guarantee them a static address, and so every once in a while it may change.

There's a solution to this problem called "dynamic DNS". You register an internet domain name, and then have the DNS managed by one of any number of dynamic DNS providers. You also install a small piece of software on your computer. This software detects if your IP address changes, and if so, lets the dynamic DNS provider know about the change. When people try to resolve the domain name, the dynamic DNS provider will ensure that it goes to your current IP address.

There are many different dynamic DNS providers out there (so do a search), e.g. DynDNS.

Firewall on Mac OS X Leopard.

We were made aware of an issue that can affect people using Leopard's firewall with ProjectForum or CourseForum. This is relevant for all versions, not just version 6.0.

If you've got the firewall set to "Set access for specific services and applications", Leopard will ask you the first time you run if you'd like to allow the application to accept incoming network connections. When you agree to this, Leopard actually goes and modifies the application. Unfortunately, this causes our application to get corrupted and fail to start up again without a reinstall.

At present the workaround is not to enable that setting in the firewall; we're investigating how we might be able to address this issue from our end.

Some Initial Reactions.

A lot of people have already tried out the new version, and initial feedback has been good.

There have been a couple of glitches reported with the new editor.

For Safari users; be advised that Safari 3 is needed to run the new editor; Safari 2 doesn't have the needed browser features. Safari 3 was included in the last point release of Tiger, as well as in Leopard. There's also one issue, in that the bold/italic buttons work in the editor, but the resulting bold/italic isn't properly saved.

For people who use a lot of embedded HTML or custom links in their pages, the new editor is trying a bit too hard to interpret the HTML code, rather than essentially just presenting the raw HTML code or the body of the custom link.

We'll probably do a quick patch release for these; if anyone is running into these glitches and would be interested in testing a patch when we get one together, please get in touch.

Introducing Version 6.0.

Today we're very happy to make available version 6.0 of both our CourseForum and ProjectForum wiki products. If you'd like to, please check out the press release, as well as the detailed list of changes.

The new versions can be downloaded via the main ProjectForum and CourseForum product pages. This update was also rolled out to our hosting customers over the weekend.

As the version number indicates, this is a pretty major release. You'll notice a couple big new things. The most obvious is a new editor, which works as a more "What You See Is What You Get" (WYSIWYG) style like you'd find in programs like Word. Our goal with this was to provide a familiar writing environment that still isn't so complex that you're thinking all the time about how to format things, rather than communication and collaboration, which are at the heart of our products.

This new editor complements the existing one, and you can switch between them as you need. Towards the right side of the formatting toolbar on either editor (next to the preview link) is a button which lets you go back and forth.

If you are running into problems the first time you try to edit a page (for example, seeing just a formatted page, but no editor), it may be that your web browser has cached some older versions of the Javascript files that control the editor. Try to clear your browser cache or force reload the page (Shift-Refresh or Control-Refresh usually) and see if that clears things up.

The other big thing is the new site-wide user accounts option. This isn't actually new, in that it's long been part of our Enterprise version (Campus for CourseForum). However, we've now made this feature available in the standard versions.

This provides the option of having a single user account that works in all the groups that you've been given access to, rather than needing a separate password for each. Using site-wide accounts may be an attractive option for sites where many users participate in many different groups. The existing per-group user accounts are still there, and in fact you can mix and match as needed.

There's also a number of smaller changes; again, you can see the details in the change log.

We're grateful for all the help we've gotten from our beta testers over the last weeks. As people continue to roll out the new version, we'll keep this weblog updated with any hints or tips we receive that have helped make the transition easier.

Q: Can I have a table of contents for a page, like in Wikipedia?

If you use headings (***Heading***), then at the very top of the page, you can put [toc:] which is short for table of contents... this will render a list of the headings with links to each one.

Hosting Servers Upgraded.

Our hosting servers have been upgraded to use the newest 6.0 version of ProjectForum (release for download pending..). Info on the 6.x can for the moment be found on our beta page.

The obvious thing that you'll notice right away is the new richtext editor. If you'd like, you can switch back to using the "regular" editor (or switch between them). On the right side of the editing toolbar, just next to the grow/shrink window buttons is a button which will let you switch.

If you're seeing weird behavior when you first load the edit page (e.g. formatted HTML, but no editor of any kind), it may be a web browser caching issue, where your browser hasn't loaded all the updated files needed by the new editor. Try to do a force-refresh in your browser (usually Ctrl-Refresh or Shift-Refresh) or clear your cache in the browser preferences and try again.

If you have any questions about this, please do not hesitate to email support.

Q: I have two separate groups, can I merge them together?

Unfortunately, there is no way to automatically do this (the potential for conflicts, starting with the Home page, is quite large). The best thing to do is probably go into each page of the group to be merged, click the edit button, copy the contents out, and then paste it into a page in the group you'd like to merge it into.

6.0 Beta 4.

We've posted what should hopefully be the final beta release of 6.0, containing several bug fixes and minor additions.

Q: Can I have two separate web sites running from one ProjectForum server?

Each ProjectForum server will run a single site; however, that site can contain many different groups (depending on the size of your license). Let's say you have two different clients, and want to provide a wiki area for each of them.

Having completely separate sites would mean something like http://client1.yourdomain.com, http://client2.yourdomain.com, etc. This is not really supported; you'd have to purchase two single-group ProjectForum licenses and run two different instances of the ProjectForum server.

The normal way this is handled is to have everything running off one webserver, but each group having a separate area, e.g. http://wiki.yourdomain.com/client1, http://wiki.yourdomain.com/client2, and so on. Each area is completely independent - different set of pages, different user accounts, and everything. So there's very little reason not to run the multiple groups off of one site, using one ProjectForum server.

6.0 Beta Feedback.

We've been getting some great feedback on the 6.0 beta releases; people seem to really like both the new editor and the site-wide accounts feature that are the main highlights. We've gotten lots of good details about how certain things work that have helped us firm things up. We're working to get the production version of 6.0 out as soon as we can, so if you haven't yet tried it, please do! The more feedback we get, the better it will be.