WordPress Publisher Blog

As well as all the excitement about us backing BuddyPress, I’ve seen quite a few interesting articles this past week about WordPress being used as more than blogging software. As well as there being great example of WordPress being used as a full Content Management System (CMS), WordPress is being used in a lot of creative ways.

Raanan recently wrote about WordPress being used for contact management, this week we have Chris Cagle’s “How to Use WordPress as a Membership Directory“, “TDO Forum WordPress Theme“which I read about in Scott Gilbertson’s “Turn Your WordPress Blog into a Forum“, and Raj Dash’s “48 Unique Ways To Use WordPress“.

A great example of innovative work being done in the WordPress community is the WP Contact Manager by The Design Canopy:

WP Contact Manager is a different kind of theme for WordPress. With a little bit of work (outlined in detail below) it turns WordPress into a contact manager. You can add contacts through the regular admin interface, tag contacts, search them and more.

Very much in the early development stages, Joseph Scott points out that:

It’s a bit more involved to setup than Prologue, but it has the same basic premiss, use WordPress as the base and build features on top of it.

You can learn more and try out the demo here.

When we released the Prologue WordPress theme for group communication, we knew it would be used in innovative ways.

This past weekend we saw it utilized for a Startup Weekend, an event where you can “Build Community and a Company in a Weekend”:

Bloomington, Indiana was a proud host to Startup Weekend, which completed a 54-hour marathon weekend of design, planning and implementation of a new company. Although the organizational structure is still in progress, the consensus of the majority who stuck around for all three days of work is that this was a great experience. There is a strong desire to take our project to the next stage and release our work to the world.

The group used the WordPress Prologue theme to keep up to date with various updates and activities:

We tried to be as transparent as we could (until the legal team advised us to be selective), and evidence of the process is available on the official blog and in our Prologue stream.

You can see the “Prologue stream” from this past weekend in action here at talk.bloomingtonstartup.com .

We launched a new theme today for WordPress.com and self-hosted WordPress called Prologue.

Prologue is a way for “each of us to share short messages about what we’re doing or working on internally, or private messages between groups of folks.”

As you can see from the screenshot below and by clicking through to the Prologue demo it’s all about helping teams of people communicate and collaborate in an efficient manner — similar to Twitter but with a focus on groups.

For publishers looking to deploy this kind of tool, Prologue is very easy to use.  Like other themes for WordPress, you can install this on WordPress.com with a single click in your “Presentation” tab, or quickly add it to your themes directory for self-installed WordPress.

And since Prologue is a theme,  it leverage the power of WordPress to provide user management, privacy settings, RSS feeds, Gravatar, and more.