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.
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