Wordpress gets a Buddy
March 5, 2008

Automattic, the brains behind wordpress have snapped up the services of Andy Peatling and his BuddyPress plugins.
At the moment a place holder is all that we can see at the BuddyPress site, but Andy on his blog says…
I’ve been all consumed in WordPress for the past two years now, I think almost every single site I’ve built since working as a freelancer has used WordPress in some way. To get the opportunity to concentrate fully on WordPress everyday, and also the chance to help mould WordPress in new ways is a fantastic one not to be missed.
Also, the buddypress.com domain is in the process of being moved, so further updates on the project will be available there once the move has been completed.
BuddyPress is a series of plug-ins that turns your Wordpress installation into a Social Network, Automattic have already indicated that they would like to dip their toe into world of Social Networking so this acquisition makes sense to them.
Wordpress Prologue Gets an Update
January 30, 2008

Wordpress yesterday announced a new blog template called Prologue;
It’s called Prologue, and it’s a new theme for WordPress.com users and blogs running off hosted WordPress installs. The goal of the theme is to let anyone setup a microblog, either for themselves or as a group–both public and private. Users can post short, to-the-point messages to their blog without having to go through WordPress’ primary interface. It’s essentially doing what Twitter can’t, which is letting people create their own private groups and tag their posts for sorting later on.
From the feedback they have had over the past couple of days they have announced some improvements and new features
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The front page now shows a stream of recent updates instead of one update per user
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Pages now have their own template and look much better
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Avatars are only shown once for sequential posts by the same author (front page and tag pages)
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Post titles are no longer empty, they are generated based on the beginning of each post
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Works out of the box for WordPress.org 2.3.2
The front page on Prologue originally only showed one post per user. Many people were confused by this or didn’t like it. After taking a step back I tend to agree, so a more traditional stream of the most recent posts is now shown. Pages are first class citizens again with their own template. Since posts in Prologue don’t have user supplied titles it now generates a title for WordPress based on the content of the post. This makes other features of WordPress work as expected (like the Recent Comments widget).












