Simplicity of design has been one of the most perceptible advantages of Wikidot for many years. Making things limpid and not overwhelming has been one of our priorities from the very beginning, that's for sure. Nevertheless the Web 2.0 (3.0, 4.0…) trends are changing, Wikidot can't afford to stay behind and needs to evolve.

This is why we are proud to present the new era of Wikidot's look&feel. It's the new level of custom design, which gives a tool to create amazingly attractive and sophisticated websites with almost infinite possibilities.

I bet you have noticed. Fall is already here. Summer holidays are over and it is time to get back to work. Teaching, designing, publishing, any kind of work you are passionate about — it can always be done better, smarter and more efficient.

One thing that can definitely help you make your projects even more awesome is a Pro account at Wikidot. Now there is one more reason to upgrade:

All upgrades are 40% off!

Have you ever tried to create a closed or private site for your coworkers, friends or students? The problem is that if your membership policy does not state "Open" you have 3 options:

1. invite your users one by one to the new site (e.g. by email),
2. set up a password they can use when joining (password-protected membership),
3. or let them apply for membership and accept each application individually.

It's not that bad, but we can make it easier. What if your organisation uses a single domain for emails? Burch Kealey suggested that it would be much easier if he could whitelist a domain in a way that every Wikidot user with an email from whitelisted domains can do a 1-click join.

Today we are more than happy to introduce a new site management panel, aka Site Manager. Apart from visual improvements and cleaner look we tried to optimize its usability and add a bit of "freshness". The old Site Manager itself has grown from a small dashboard to a huge set of panels over the last years. As we discovered it very often introduced a steep learning curve for new users. Not to mention its design is about 6 years old now.

We did not want to re-invent the Manager. To make the transition painless we have preserved the original structure, so Wikidot experts should find their settings within seconds.

Wikidot.com has just experienced about 2-hour downtime due to database issues. The situation has not been critical and no data has been lost. We were able to fix the problem and bring the service back on-line, despite the early-morning Sunday hours.

It is the first downtime of such length for a quite long time. We consider 2 hours to be very long when we think about availability. Usually we try to keep issues from putting Wikidot down and we achieve monthly availability rate of over 99.9%, often reaching 100.0% (as reported by monitoring tools at Pingdom, based on tests on selected number of sites).

I am terribly sorry about the unavailability. This of course gives us hints how to avoid such situations in the future. I also hope that because of the weekend and early morning (UTC) hours the downtime was not that painful, and hopefully not even noticeable for most of our users.

We have been running Wikidot for almost seven years now. It is pretty long time for a web-oriented company in a fast-paced world of invention, progress and game-changing deals. No doubt Wikidot is considered a successful project, especially in Poland, where we come from.

In March I was invited to Openreactor — a Warsaw meeting for startup-oriented folks — to give a short speech about Wikidot and share my thoughts about running global, world-wide web services. The video has been recently released and I think it is worth sharing.

For these who have no time to watch the whole talk, but are still interested (or want to go global with their projects), here is a short summary:

#0 Prerequisite: stop reading Techcrunch, it might be depressing
#1 Make an AWESOME (and useful) product (that you would use yourself)
#2 Have a scalable business model
#3 Start small and grow (vs. inflate and die)
#4 Become THE face of your product
#5 Build communities
#6 Get only the best people to work with you
#7 Automate everything
#8 Scale your costs — use the cloud

My conclusion is that in order to run a successful project you do not need to be located in Silicon Valley, London nor Berlin. Nor does your project need to be large — you can avoid a problem of over-inflation. Growing slowly is great too.

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It has been a while since the last blog post by the Wikidot Team. During the last two months we have been seriously involved in a few other urgent web projects. Unfortunately the amount of work we had affected our activity at Wikidot itself. But even though we have not been extremely active on the surface, lot of work has been done on infrastructure improvements and maintenance in order to make sure that Wikidot sites are hosted securely and served the best way we can.

There are good news coming too: to keep up with the work we are expanding our Wikidot team. The bugs/wishes pipeline should see a significant improvement in the near future. Our other projects are approaching the finish line — it means we are getting back on the track after several really exhausting weeks!

Thank you for all your support and your help!

Michal Frackowiak, CEO of Wikidot

PS. Regular blog posts will be back too!