Introducing Prologue
Update: We’ve released a new and improved version of this Prologue theme with real-time notification, threaded conversations, and more — we are calling it P2.
We’re fans of Twitter around here, in fact many Automatticians have accounts, but while the format appealed to us it really just whetted our appetite for something more, like a way for each of us to share short messages about what we’re doing or working on internally, or private messages between groups of folks.
So last week Joseph Scott and Matt Thomas decided to tackle this problem and within a few days they had a new theme for us: Prologue. Imagine it like a group Twitter. It’s best demonstrated with a demo:
If you click on the screenshot above, you’ll see a live demo blog with some messages from different Automattic folks. 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.
You can have a custom header to personalize the Prologue for your group, and just like any WordPress.com blog you have advanced privacy options: the blog can be public, public but invisible to search engines, and password-protected (available only to members).
Just like a blog post, each message in the prologue can have comments, and of course each comments thread has its own RSS feed. (Just like in regular WP.)
As a completely virtual company with no two people in the same place every day, we often have trouble keeping up with each other, so we’re going to be using a password-protected Prologue that only Automattic employees can access as one of our methods of communication, much like some other companies use Basecamp.
Some folks have suggested that using WordPress, Prologue, and RSS you could create a pretty effective distributed version of Twitter. This isn’t something we’re personally interested in, but we’ve made the theme available as open source under the GPL so if you want to hack around it yourself you’re welcome to. For WordPress.com users the theme is available in your “Presentation” section.
The staff was in an undisclosed location outside of Oracle, Arizona last week. I obtained some exclusive paparazzi shots taken by Alex Shiels. Here’s Andy lounging:
Here’s me kicking people’s butts at Wii tennis. 😉
Finally here was our training for spammer-wrangling.
- January 28, 2008
- Themes
is there any way to get more than one entry per user on the main page? i think it’d be neat if this were possible (it’d be like a simulated chat).
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doobybrain, the new version does just that. Enjoy!
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Very interestink!
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Sweet! I can’t wait to try this out. As a director in a virtual company, this will make my life so much easier!!! You are divine.
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love the theme, this is exactly what i’ve been looking for and i’m looking to use it for some PM.
i downloaded the theme and installed it on a hosted server, works like a charm save a few things…
has anyone else installed a hosted version of prologue? any examples? any forum/help sites to discuss modifying it? i’m playing with privacy issues and it’s getting kinda funky (no totally private option on hosted installs…also the author pages/rss feeds don’t work on a hosted install)….thanks!
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On your own hosted install the best bet to protect the blog is either htaccess or one of the private blog plugins, which you can find on wordpress.org.
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The photos really are funny. I hope you had a lot of fun, guys!
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Congrats people! We’ll see how we can offer that to our users at FlashToGo.com. It would be nice o integrate a MicroBlog to our Flash-based sites. Keep going!
🙂
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And good to see you are moving forward with the Google acquisition.
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good photos!
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It’s really very creative, but I’m kind of lost at how practical it would be for a hosted install since, from what I’m seeing here, pages aren’t showing up.
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Oh I /like/ that! Excellent stuff 🙂
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Now I am thinking that the only thing this lacks is the ability to email in a post, that could make posting from a mobile phone much easier. Why not give an option to pay some minimal fee to be able to post via email?
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Are those pics of you away from the computer? How do you find the time, dude?
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The World’s Finally Getting a Voice
Michael Wales has fired out a very interesting post proposing that WordPress’ new ‘Prologue’ theme, (and maybe with other new technologies), could carve the way for a new method of communication online.
By allowing users to put in the…
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now i wish that someone that could develop a sms plugin to work with it… then we have moblogging. yay!
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Hey, this may be a newb question, but how do I set up Prologue?
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It’s true! this is totally amazing – I’m blogging about it! Why aren’t I a comp genius :(… Looks like where yu guys are is the place to be! It’s a great tool – can’t wait to check it out.
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great,
where can we try prologue 🙂
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did anyone ever fall off the horses???? 😆 😉 hehe
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haven’t went looking for the combo of plugins needed yet but for closed/private group microblogging:
– private blog plugin, preferably something with .htaccess so that RSS feeds can be accessed from members’ aggregators
– email alerts of posts
– shared login across wp installs (for groups that are based around the production of another wordpress blog)
– jabber/aim bot posting and notifying
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Hi Matt. Any chance we can get moderation added into the comment template for Prologue? That way if moderation is in place, it will let the person know comment is in moderation.
Also, some closing php tags are missing on various files in the theme… mostly in the area calling the footer.
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