Manage a Team or Build a Community with the P2 Theme

Whether you need a blog, website, portfolio, or something in between, we have a number of designs, called themes, to choose from. But what about a space to manage a community? A private site to track team projects? A forum to hold discussions in your class? Consider P2, a unique theme that’s ideal for groups. Here are a few ways to make P2 work for you.

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The P2 theme is ideal for group collaboration: you can share updates, plan and manage projects, foster conversations, and more. Your group can use it in lieu of email — chatting and responding instead on P2’s post threads — or use it as a space to ask questions and document information and processes. (It’s a great companion to Slack!)

While especially made for groups, P2 is also helpful for individuals looking to build upon their existing followings — think fan forum or members-only chat area. And just like any other site on WordPress.com, you can make your P2 site public or private. You can also customize it to match your primary site or organization’s brand.

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Manage a community

With P2, you can build and foster a more intimate community with your most loyal readers. A companion P2 allows you to expand on discussions that happen on your posts’ comment threads, or get to know your followers on a different level. On a P2, you can @mention site members (similar to the feature on Twitter) to engage and pull readers into conversations. If you want a private, members-only space, readers can be added to the site first before they can participate.

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Host a discussion forum

Whether you’re a writer in a small workshop group or an instructor overseeing a large cohort in an online course, you can create a P2 to hold and moderate discussions. Post questions using the theme’s front-end editor and watch participants respond, in real time. (And if your members aren’t all online at the same time, P2 is effective in facilitating asynchronous communication.) It’s also a great way to gather story or assignment feedback and simply have conversations online in the absence of face-to-face meetings.

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Track your team’s updates

You can take advantage of common formatting tools to create team status updates, project reports, and the like. Use bullet lists and checklists to track the progress of assignments, and upload media files to enhance your posts. Keeping everything documented and searchable on the P2 (via search widget) allows for transparency, so all team members can follow along. For organizations like Automattic — the company behind WordPress.com — hundreds of P2s dedicated to different teams, projects, and interests act as virtual watercoolers for employees.

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Set up the invitation process

You’ll set up your P2 so people — whether blog readers, website visitors, company employees, or others — can request access to the group. There are different ways you can do this. One option is to create a custom form with a tool like Crowdsignal, Typeform, or a WordPress.com contact form to gather information and vet members before adding them to your community.

If your P2 is viewable to the public, you can display a sticky post at the top that welcomes new visitors and links to the form. If your P2 is private, you can link to the form on a page or post on your primary blog or organization website, or send an email to specific individuals with details about the group and the link to the form.

A welcome message “stuck” to the top of a P2 with a link to an invite form, shown below.

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Ready to get started?

Since you can create multiple sites on your WordPress.com account for free, we recommend creating a new site for your P2. Go to My Site → Switch Site → Add New Site and go through the steps to create a new site. If you prefer to use an existing site, switch its current theme to P2 by going to My Site → Themes and typing “P2” in the search bar. Then, select and activate the P2 theme. For more help, contact us or post in the theme support forum.

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Have an idea for a great way to use P2? Let us know in the comments.