You may have heard about or be using Twitter, a popular ‘microblogging‘ service that allows you to write short messages that friends or followers can subscribe to. Well, Automattic, the company behind WordPress, have developed the P2 theme, which turns a WordPress site into a (sort of) microblogging site for groups of people to post simple updates to. Automattic use the theme themselves as a way for their 30 employees, who all work in different places around the world, to keep up-to-date with what their colleagues are doing.
Prologue is a good example of how a theme can fundamentally affect the way your WordPress site looks and operates. Once you’re logged in, you only rarely need to visit the Dashboard again as you can post updates from the top of the front page of your site. Your tags are displayed in the sidebar and the default set up implies that you think of tags more like formal categories and limit them to project components or individual areas of responsibility. If you prefer though, you can use the tag cloud widget instead and tag away to your heart’s content. For even greater flexibility, each tags has a web feed, so that you can ‘follow’ specific parts of a project and segment updates to the blog in your news reader. In addition, you can adjust the privacy of your microblog to suit you. If you’re not sure what all this means but think it sounds interesting, contact CERD and in 30 minutes you’ll know all there is to know!
You might also be interested to know that the theme is tweaked for the iPhone so that when you visit the site on your iPhone or iPod Touch, it’s reformatted to display perfectly with the post box at the top. I’ve been using Prologue for a while now and it’s a real pleasure to use as it allows you to focus entirely on your message.