Which themes work best for a group of users?
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How can find themes that lend themselves to being used by a group traveling abroad, with at least one of the participants posting a summary of the day with photos every day? The names of the authors should be visible. I came across one that might work but I would like to see other designs.
The blog I need help with is: (visible only to logged in users)
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I would suggest you check out P2, which is designed for collaborative ventures, and is sort of patterned after twitter, but without the character limit. You can post directly from the front page (when logged in) and make a short update sort of thing, or you can do a complete blog post by clicking the “blog post” button.
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If you could spell out exactly what you’re looking for, we could give you a better idea. Photoblogging? Personalized posts? What do you need?
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You can also email in your Posts. Not sure what that would be for formatting with a lot of pictures.
Windows Live Writer (and several others) will let you put the Post together on your PC the just click “Post” and it logs into your site and uploads the Post.
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I was going to suggest P2 as well. There’s also Prologue and it’s a group blog theme for short update messages, inspired by Twitter.
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The one I have found that seems best was one my nephew and his study group used this summer. Here it is ukstudyabroad.wordpress.com. The theme is Ocean Mist. I set up a draft for my group here using the same theme: susannecannon.wordpress.com.
The idea is that every day I expect a student or two to submit a summary of our corporate and site visits in Beijing, Shanghai and Hong Kong, probably with a photo or two. It is possible, but not too likely, that others (family members back home, for example) will want to comment on what they see. But mostly I think this is a way to have the 16 students and faculty reflect on their meetings and to post their summaries for their contacts to see. I had just hoped that there might be other themes (colors, typefaces, etc.) to look at that accomplish the same things that the ukstudyabroad group did. -
Ocean Mist is a really beginner-friendly theme. I teach WP, and a good 40% of my students choose that one as their theme, although I do think the pretty picture at the top is part of its attraction. It does have pretty standard functionality.
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I was just trying to help set up a group blog for a baking group and was trying out P2. Who would I ask about some things that I don’t understand on how it is supposed to work? Is this the right place or should I contact 24/7 support? thanks Joanna
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These are the points that are bothering me….in P2
Am I right that if you post directly from the front page you can’t upload images, but can only do that when you write a proper post? I tried for quite a long time last night to do that and concluded that was the case. Also when you edit the theme and the widgets there are two extra sidebars called top sidebar and bottom sidebar but nothing seems to happen with those. Excuse me if these are stupid questions… -
@zebathome — First, you’re questions are not stupid. :) Second, to your points:
Image uploading: It’s not exactly intuitive, but it should work. You can click the small icons to the right of the post area to upload media. The trick is inserting the image into the post. A bug in P2 exists where the “Insert to Post” button is missing after you upload the image. To get around this: after the upload (while still in the upload window) you can click Media Gallery, then Show, then Insert to Post.
Sidebars: the “top” and “bottom” sidebars are extraneous and not used in the theme. We plan to remove those widget areas soon to avoid confusion.
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Also note:
You can’t insert images from URLs on the front page. (you can do it dashboard —> edit post)
After you make a post, you can edit it to add more pictures, but not directly. Click insert image button, choose a picture from the media library (or upload then choose media library as lance described), and insert it. The html for the new picture will appear in the new post window at the top. Copy all of the code, then place your cursor where you want the new picture to be and paste the code there. Save. Click on the blog title to navigate away from the code in the new post. Whew!!
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Thanks for the replies but I am a bit puzzled now – are you
saying two different things here… ? Lance is saying that there is a bug but it has a work around, which is sort of what I thought, otherwise why would you put the icons on the front page if they aren’t supposed to work…. and 1tess is saying that you can’t insert images at all on the front page is that right?We are aiming to use this for a run up to an event exchange of information blog and I don’t know if all the users will understand this. Is the other group blog theme more picture friendly, I think it is called Prologue. Thanks again Joanna
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I just tried your work around and it doesn’t work Lance. The insert to Post is visible, you click on it and the window just goes blank and nothing happens.
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@zebathome
Please excuse me for entering this discussion but I do have a suggestion to make that I think may be helpful.I believe that we learn best by doing and that every blogger needs a test blog. :) in this case I would like to encourage you to register another blog as a test blog and set it to “private”. By using the information Staff and Volunteers provide and experimenting with P2 and Proloue there you will be able to see which theme best accomplishes what you want it to.
It’s easy to register another blog and you can use it to test everything you may consider using on your main blog first in it without disrupting your readers. If you wish to do this when you are logged into wordpress.com point your browser to http://wordpress.com/signup to register your new blog.
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It looks to me as if all the editing and picture/url inserting has to be done via dashboard. The front page part looks like it just takes text and it is a bit buggy isn’t it? I don’t know if my lot will cope with it. Can you suggest another theme which might work with multiple authors better?
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Hi Timethief, that is exactly what I have done, made a private dummy blog, I thought it was going to work at frist and I have made a second one and put the people who are going to ‘own it’ on as administrators, but I feel like a bit of a twit if it doesn’t work easily as they haven’t blogged before. Thanks :)
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I also don’t understand the function of the Link, and Quote buttons at the top of the front page. What exactly are they supposed to do, if anything. You click Quote and an extra box appears saying Citation. Is there a faq for this theme anywhere that I can read without bothering you guys?
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I’ve worked out the Quote one now, but not the Link button. I see you have taken off those sidebars that didn’t do anything – that’s great!
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The closest thing we have to an FAQ is http://p2theme.com/ — documentation for themes is area that we know needs work. :)
The Status, Blog Post, Quote, and Link are different types of posts. When you click the various types you’ll see how the input fields change; Link is designed to share a link to something interesting. They are also styled a bit differently: Status won’t show the post title, whereas Blog Post does. Quote styles the post a bit differently. Now that I look at it, Link acts much like Status.
Here is a site you can play with: http://p2demo.wordpress.com/ if you don’t want to set up your own.
I just tried an image upload there (using the steps I detailed earlier), and it worked. If you get a blank page, that could be a browser bug — could you tell us what browser version you use?
Overall P2 is a great theme, and very nice for quick updates. As with all our themes, we will continue to improve it and make it better… so thanks for the feedback.
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Is there a faq for this theme anywhere that I can read without bothering you guys?
No I’m sorry there isn’t. :(
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