At our Automattic offsite last week, Joseph Scott and Matt Thomas created a very cool new WordPress theme that we plan to use in-house: Prologue.
Inspired by Twitter, you can see it in action in this live demo. Prologue is also available as an open source theme to use with your self-hosted WordPress blog.
Full details here on the WordPress.com blog plus an early review on Mashable.
My gut tells me we’ll see some really interesting mods with this theme — can’t wait.
UPDATE: Lots of interest already — the announcement post just made the top of techmeme:
Raanan Bar-Cohen 
This is really cool. Nice jujitsu.
I think I’ve already figured out a use for this theme in a couple of scenarios.
Great stuff!
cool — thanks. can’t wait to see how you use it 🙂
I think for corporate use this could also be a real great tool since so many companies have deployed WordPress for internal & public facing blogs. Adding the Prologue theme is a super simple step …
I posted at our publisher blog: http://publisherblog.automattic.com/2008/01/28/prologue-group-communication-using-wordpress/
and have already received feedback from a few people looking to use it on internal projects.
Speaking of mods: I banged my head on 3 things right off: no sidebar? doesn’t display pages? and, most importantly, when I post a new item the previous one/s disappear, even though it’s configured to display 10.
I’m hoping to find out who’s working on this (I imagine Matt’s pretty busy) to pitch in. Joseph Scott?
http://42words.wordpress.com
Ok … I’m gonna call that one a mulligan.
Writing that cleared the log-jam: the sidebar is there, and it can be configured to carry Pages, so that’s good.
And *D’uhh!* since the theme is intended to show only the most recent post from each contributor, it’s behavior is quite correct.
Why couldn’t I figure this out last night? Let’s say I had a long day.
cheers
@bentrem —
🙂
the theme has been updated to show a stream, not just the latest post per user.
Joseph posted details here: http://joseph.randomnetworks.com/archives/2008/01/29/prologue-update/
@raanan Pretty fine how fast the page / category snafu got fixed, but I have to say y’all moved too fast to show stream.
In the comment I put on Chris Brogan’s “Prologue is More Than …”; my thinking was this: fine stuff to fix the functionality, but there was some value in the previous logic … and IMNSHO that got blown away in haste. (Some folk didn’t get it? Yaa, ok … and lotsa folk “don’t get” Twitter … )
I think it’s too bad that the “most recent from each” got blown away.
The suggestion I’d made was that “stream” be accessible, perhaps as a separate page, but that homepage remain as it had been originally. (I don’t know what the discussion had been, but I support it, as a plausible alternative logic.)
I have the previous version, the one that has that logic, but it also has all the frabbed stuff. And the updates w/fixes blows away that logic.
I’d make this request: for those of us who don’t grok WP tables and SQL logic (My page on Codex shows I’m working on it!), to release a branch that a) has the fixes to Page and Category, but b) retains that distinctive “most recent from each” feature.
Heck, I’ll take the task of hacking that to create a stream page as an entry point!
cheers
–bentrem
p.s. sure wish there was Preview here.
@bentrem —
all interesting ideas and ones that are being debated all over the place 🙂
Since we release everything as open source you can definitely tweak it — and I’m sure many other people will be coming out soon with various implementations.
also, if you aren’t already signed up, I’d recommend joining the wp-hackers mailing list for these types of topics: http://codex.wordpress.org/Mailing_Lists
cheers.
@raanan I must be in the right groove; just re-read AKing’s “AllThingsDigital” post and heh found myself right back here. *grin*
But “being debated all over the place” … yaa, I get that feeling, but I’m not in the loop. (technorati loaded in another tab; I’m about to go geek hunting)
Peek http://bentrem.sycks.net/blog/ … I just installed the ExtJS theme (and also the ExtJS Admin menus … gawd, goodness is sweet sometimes!) and blue-sky pondering that page gave me a thought, in keeping with my “cognitive ergonomics” hobby horse, and supporting my feeling that “most recent from each” should have been preserved.
Imagine this: only a single blurt from each contributer … but mouse-over a geeky-sweet icon in each and a popup opens displaying the last, say, 7 blurts (limited lengtch? truncated? plugs?) along with a >More< link).
*shrug*
Anyhow, if I can recover an intermediate build I’ll run with that.
And TU for pointer to (yet another!) the mail-list.
cheers
bdt
p.s. no email notification … *humph*. Years on LJ (email notification and threaded comments both) have spoiled me.
🙂
I actually deployed Prologue 1.2 for something that will likely get no use but I like the idea. See
http://www.mapleridgecourt.com/
This is a website for my neighborhood and the idea that neighbors can use this to keep in touch in a loose “tweet” like manor is nifty.
coolll…you can see my prologue modification on cocktailshows.com .. I m working for media upload from post-form…
@levent — you may be interested in the updated Prologue theme we’ve called P2: http://p2demo.wordpress.com/ and http://ma.tt/2009/05/how-p2-changed-automattic/