Author: Raanan Bar-Cohen

Raanan Bar-Cohenhttps://raanan.com/
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More P2 Goodness

The other day we released the P2 WordPress theme. This theme features:

  • Threaded comment display on the front page.
  • In-line editing for posts and comments.
  • Live tag suggestion based on previously used tags.
  • A show/hide feature for comments, to keep things tidy.
  • Real-time notifications when a new comment or update is posted. (If you have a Mac, you know what we mean when we say it’s Growl-like.)
  • Super-handy keyboard shortcuts: c to compose a new post; j to go to the next item; k to go to the previous item; r to reply; e to edit; o to show and hide comments; t to go to the top; esc to cancel.
  • Helvetica Neue for you modern font lovers.

But to really see how this theme works you need to see a video or play around with a demo. So we’ve done that 🙂

Demo site: http://p2demo.wordpress.com/
Video demo:

P2: The New Prologue

Since we are very distributed company here at Automattic, we use lots of online collaboration tools including IRC, Skype, blogs, and wikis.  The other big thing we’ve been using internally is a WordPress theme called Prologue that we developed last year.

Prologue is essentially a group twitter theme, and we’ve been hard at work updating it ( we are calling the new version P2 ) to include ajax updates, growl-like notifications, threaded comments, and a few other really clever features.  It also looks great on the iPhone !

It’s available right now on WordPress.com, and will be available for self-hosted WordPress within a week or so.   Definitely worth checking out.

Idan Raichel Performing at SF Jazz

Really excited that Idan Raichel is coming to San Francisco.  He’s performing as part of the SF Jazz Spring Season later this month – details here.

“The Idan Raichel Project is an Israeli musical collective that features singers from Ethiopia, and a cross-cultural roster of Yemenite, Arab, African and Caribbean musicians.”  Happens to also be one of this artists I listen to most 🙂

Below is one of his popular songs:

If you are in SF,  definitely worth checking out.

Looking For a Mobile Engineer

With the success of the WordPress for iPhone app and the great new mobile devices that are coming out, we are now looking to add a Mobile Engineer to the Automattic team:

Take WordPress and other Automattic projects to the small screen by developing Open Source mobile products for multiple mobile platforms. Work on apps for Android, Pre, Windows Mobile, BlackBerry, iPhone, and other platforms using such interfaces like our XML-RPC API.

Check out the Jobs page for more details.

Relaunch Your Site on WordPress ?

That would be the case for TheStreet.com if Howard Lindzon’s plan is executed 🙂

The company has $80 million in cash and no debt and a shitpile of traffic. It just has a useless model for 2009 and the market is screaming so.

I have people I like that work there and don’t mean to step on toes, but I have a plan.

1. Fire everyone save Cramer, Doug Kass and few of the successful Newsletter writers. It’s not about job performance, it’s about reality. Start with the Board. The Board should be ashamed and should have quit already.

2. Shutter New York. Just sneak out in the middle of the night. Phoenix is nice. Lot’s of empty buildings.

3. Relaunch TheStreet.com on WordPress and just nuke the piece of shit software and site they have going right now (Obviously this has to be ready to go before all the head count poleaxing).

[ emphasis mine ]

Read more of howard’s thoughts on howardlindzon.com.

What’s interesting about Howard’s advise is that we are seeing and hearing about lots of sites switching to WordPress now as their full CMS — a trend that is really picking up momentum in the last 6 months.  With features such as revision control, full user management, page support, and the thriving plugin eco-system it’s making a ton of sense to use WordPress for full sites now.

Help Beta Test New WordPress for iPhone App

I’m looking for beta testers to try out the new app on their iPhone/iPod Touch device.  Details on the iphone.wordpress.com blog.

The new version includes new features such as:

  • Landscape mode with the extra wide keyboard
  • Link creation help
  • Support for editing and creating Pages
  • Comment moderation
  • Asynchronous publishing
  • Photo resizing options

A quick video overview below:

WordCamp San Francisco 2009

After chatting with a few people this week, I realized that not everyone knows that we announced the details for WordCamp San Francisco 2009.  It will be held on Saturday May 30th, 2009 at the Mission Bay Conference Center, and you can signup now.

It’s going to be a great event this year with outstanding speakers already lined up including Matt Cutts, Tim Ferriss, Steve Souders, Tara Hunt, and other fabulous folks.

We are also coordianting sponsors for this event.  If you are interested you can contact me directly or drop us a note here.

Hope to see you all at the event in just a few short months.