wordpress

Prologue – WordPress based distributed Twitter

prologue Matt Mullenweg has announced over on the WordPress.com blog that Automattic, the company behind WP.com, Akismet and the driving force behind WordPress development, have created a new theme for WordPress. Whoopie-do, you might be thinking. But this theme is more than just a look and feel for your WordPress blog. This theme clones Twitter. To quote the post:

Basically how it works is when someone has the ability to post to a blog they see a short form at the top of the home page with a post box and tags. There they can post short messages about what they’re doing.

Below the posting box is a list of everyone’s latest tweet or message, with their Gravatar next to it. You can click on an author to see all their messages, or a tag to see all of the messages in a given tag (which we use for projects). There are RSS feeds for everything: the entire prologue, each author, each tag, and even combination or searches can be subscribed to in your RSS reader.

How incredibly excellent. I’ve been after a clone of Twitter for a while, and to be able to combine it with my beloved WordPress is just awesome. I’m already putting something together to make use of this!

10 Cool WordPress themes

WordPress

One of the many reasons why WordPress is such a super publishing platform are the many themes which are freely available to give your site a professional look and feel.

1. Envy – WPDesigner.com

Envy theme

Envy is a bold and bright theme with plenty of different elements to help you personalise it.

2. Insense – BloggingPro.com

Insense

Insense is a really classy, professional looking theme, which is just as useful for putting together a WP powered static site as it is a blog.

3. PhotoPress – Performancing

Photopress

Perfect for photo or video based blogs.

4. Elite – WPZone.net

Elite

Smart, darker theme. Sometimes themes with a black background can cause problems when inserting images – especially those with a transparent background. But Elite is still pretty smart looking.

5. Illacrimo – LifeSpy.com

Illacrimo

Again, very professional looking, and the one I’ve used a few times in the past.

6. Bluvision – lucianmarin.com

Bluvision

A bit like Envy, in that it has lots of space for you to personalise your site’s appearance.

7. Simpla – Ifelse.org

Simpla

Nice, clean look – perfect for a personal blog.

8. Glossyblue – NDesign Studio

Glossyblue-1-2-screen

Glossyblue is a theme I used to use on LGNewMedia. It’s really rather lovely. I notice Tim Davies uses it for his Drupal-based blog.

9. Gridlock – Hyalineskies.com

Gridlock

Gridlock is a perfect theme for non-blog WordPress sites.

10. MistyBlue – Romow

Mistyblue

The theme I used for FEconnect, and I stil have a soft spot for it 😉

WordPress is taking over

Neville Hobson reports on the new site for BA’s new airline. And guess what? It’s running on WordPress.

More and more, public bodies and corporations are moving towards WordPress as a lightweight, flexible and powerful way of establishing a social web presence. Let’s have a look at the evidence:

Anyone got any more? I will update the post if you leave URLs in the comments.

Moving links in WordPress

WordPress never fails to astound me with its brilliance.

I still haven’t finished putting this blog together properly yet, but today thought I ought to at least cobble together a mini blogroll of some of my favourite fellow bloggers. I’d already got a blogroll at my old blog, and the thought of copying and pasting them across was not, to be honest, a pleasing one.

A quick Google later though, and I had been alerted to the page residing on every WP blog, at http://yourblog.com/wp-links-opml.php. All you have to do is chuck this into the "import" option on your control panel, and you’re away.

OK, this could be made easier by allowing you to download the OPML file straight from your originating control panel, but I expect it’s not there to avoid cluttering things up with rarely used functions. But it is at least still there, and pretty easy to use.

Open source is best

Simon Dickson muses on the advantages of using open source platforms, as opposed to proprietary ones, in the light of the Interesource debacle.

It’s funny. Not so long ago, the question was ‘why should I be using open source?’ Increasingly, I’m left wondering why anyone would use anything other than open source.

True. As Simon points out, one of the Interesource developers has mentioned the fact that none of their clients had escrow agreements in place to mitigate against this sort of risk. But when you are providing a service like a community based web platform, which people are wanting to access 24/7 escrows don’t supply the solution in an adequate time-frame, in my view. They may make managers feel happier, but don’t really give you the protection you need.

With open source, there’s bound to be someone in the office who knows about the innards of your system. Failing that, there are experts a-plenty out there on the web, easily accessible through blogs, forums and mailing lists. WordPress, the favourite of both Simon and myself, is a great example of the wonderful support communities that exist for open source systems.

So here’s a challenge: why not use open source? Well, recently Telligent – a company providing a great (if proprietary, and (worse) .NET based) community portal system called Community Server – released some information about a blogging/lightweight CMS platform they are developing. WordPress is the clear competition, which they make clear on their landing page:

Finally, a WordPress Alternative

Install and setup is easier…You don’t need to know PHP…Of course Graffiti is built on .NET and truth be told any good developer can make either PHP or ASP.NET code perform. However, we think there are more long-term advantages in Microsoft’s platform…

Hmmm. I, for one, am not convinced!

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