automattic

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.

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.

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.

USA Today: WordPress creator Mullenweg is many bloggers’ best friend

Great Interview with Matt today in the USA Today:

WordPress has become so entrenched on the Web that many of the biggest names use it now — a roster that includes CNN, Fox News and The New York Times, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, Coca-Cola and General Electric, along with millions of ordinary bloggers.

“People might start with LiveJournal or Blogger, but if they get serious, they’ll graduate to WordPress. We try to cater to the more powerful users,” says Mullenweg, 25.

I especially like the comment made by Dermot over at CNN.com:

CNN runs 30 blogs, and they’re all created the same way the general consumer does it: Programmers go to WordPress.com, sign up and create.

CNN programmers tweak the basic templates afterward to CNN’s needs, so that a CNN blog looks nothing like, say, a blog from Time magazine or Fox News. “It looks like a website that would have taken six to nine months to create, but it’s a blog we made in just a few hours,” says Dermot Waters, a senior producer for CNN.

Here is a short video interview as well:

Vodpod videos no longer available.

The full article is here.

WordPress.tv

Exciting to see this go live as I’ve been watching the progress on this for a bit.  WordPress.tv is “a new addition to the WordPress family focused on making it easy for people to both learn how to use WordPress (in its dot-com and dot-org flavours), and check out the presentations at the WordCamps sprouting up all over the globe”

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Check it out on http://wordpress.tv and read the full details over on Michael Pick’s blog.

New WordPress.com Dashboard Live !

I’m writing this post from the all new WordPress.com dashboard.  If you are on WordPress.com, go check it out.  For those of you on self-hosted WordPress, the new UI will be part of the 2.7 release which is due out next week, and you can download 2.7 RC1 now and auto-update to the final version when it’s out ( auto-updating of the core is a new feature in 2.7 ).

I’m biased — but this new UI is simply breathtaking and clairvoyant in it’s intuitiveness — how you would expect to do things is now how things are done — a very zen-like experience !  And the feedback pouring in from bloggers on WordPress.com has been very positive.

And just a quick word on the pure launch logistics last night on WordPress.com – simply amazing.   When you take into consideration that we are completely virtual company and in multiple countries, a relatively small team, run a service in multiple data centers with nearly 5 million blogs, and you look at the sheer amount of work and coordination that it took – not to mention the technical skill – it was a thing of pure beauty to watch it all come together.   Everything happened in real-time, there was no down-time maintenance window, no launch and revert and postpone, and no 5am all-hands meeting.  Just a group of rockstar colleagues working in sync and getting things done – really impressive.

PollDaddy

Exciting news – PollDaddy has joined the Automattic team.

The timing is great since the Automattic team is in the mountains of Colorado at our bi-annual company meetup, and we’ve all been able to get the know the talented PollDaddy team of Lenny and Eoin.

From my earlier days at TIME.com I’ve known that polls were huge and that readers loved particiapting.  This has been echoed in the WordPress world with very popular WordPress plugins for polls.  I’m including my quick poll here:

As Matt mentioned in his blog post, in terms of integration, “we just enabled PollDaddy with 4.4 million blogs on WordPress.com and have also released the first version of their .org plugin.”

Check out the screencast below for how to add a poll on WordPress.com: