Using the P2 Theme for group projects

In early May, Matt Mullenwegg posted a video about the P2 theme on his blog. The video demonstrates how the P2 theme changed the way they worked and blogged internally at Automattic. Since they mostly work from home, and most of the staff are bloggers, it makes sense that the company behind WordPress would use blogs to communicate.

The surprising part is that before the P2 theme, internal blogs at Automattic were very much stagnant. Matt even writes he devised a cron job script that would email summaries of new posts and comments on their internal blogs just to try and keep people connected. After coming to grips with the fact that most of his staff was on Twitter almost every day,the solution came in the form of the Prologue theme.

At its’ roots Prologue was a Twitter inspired blog theme for WordPress… Without the 125 character limit. Microblogging in group settings was the aim of this theme. However, there were still certain drawbacks to the function of a WordPress blog as a conversational microblog. They solved this by making conversations fully inline on the home page. With WP2.7’s new commenting system they were able to fully thread the comments on the the main page of a blog.

With the new P2 theme, team oriented and group blogs are productivity central! The idea revolved around getting quick status updates and responses from the team without having to log in to the admin area. or even refresh the page.

There are really a lot of practical applications for this. Blogger’s are an ambitious bunch and are often starting new projects and losing track of who is doing what. Using your own private Twitter-like microblog can really go a long way towards helping groups achieve their collective goals. This could apply to small, medium and large businesses, startups, bands or collectives of artists. You could even use a P2 powered microblog to plan and schedule a wedding.

We used a class blog in school when I was studying journalism. On the first day of class one of our professors had set up a BlogSpot blog for the class to interact and discuss projects. While he was explaining how to make a profile, log in and post items or comment on things, I was already busy at my desk posting new updates. By the time he finished explaining how to do everything and refreshed his screen my latest blog was already live and the class saw “Come watch me play an acoustic set at 100 George’s this Saturday! Admission is $5.”

Had WordPress 2.7 and the P2 theme been available at the time, I may not have gotten away with Spamming my class. The real time updating would have alerted my teacher as to my activities before he showed it to the class.

Written by Ryan Edmunds from CrunchPlay.com
Posted on June 2nd, 2009 and filed under WordPress Themes
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