Joseph Scott’s Blog

The top search result for prologue on Google is Matt’s Prologue theme announcement. That same announcement post is number 5 on Yahoo! and on Live Search / MSN Search it doesn’t show up on the first page of results at all.

Feel free to speculate on those data points.

New update for Prologue theme:

• Spacing and HTML cleanup
• New caching for sidebar tag list
• Show tags for posts on the front page
• Zip file download now available

Michael Adams cleaned up some of the HTML. The sidebar tag list generates a number of small queries so if that is causing you problems look into using one of the object cache back end. Memcache is commonly used for this, Ryan has a post on setting up a Memcache backend for WordPress.

I’ve seen many requests for a zip to be made available for the Prologue theme and now we’ve got one: Prologue 1.3

I went to lunch with Jesse Stay where we talked a bit about Prologue and what it is like to work at Automattic.

• The Prologuer Bot @ Webcracy - Some basic IM and Prologue integration
  Tags: im bot prologue wordpress

• CSS Reference - This looks promising.
  Tags: css reference

The Prologue Theme got a lot more attention that I expected (hit the top of TechMeme) and we’ve been getting a lot of feedback. So I’ve updated Prologue based on some this feedback and discussion with the the other folks at Automattic. Here’s what has changed:

• New template file for displaying Pages
• Change front page to be recent stream instead of one post per person
• Adjust tag and front page to not show an avatar if the previous post was by the same author
• Change default title for sidebar tag list to ‘Recent Tags’
• Provide a post title based on the beginning of the post content

I bumped the version listed in style.css to 1.2 when I made these changes. You can get it from the Prologue Subversion directory, and yes, I’m still looking to put together a zip file for those that prefer that method instead.

One other thing to note, I was making use of a method in Prologue that currently only exists in WordPress -trunk, this means people using WordPress 2.3.2 were getting errors (on the author pages). This has been fixed as well. Sorry about that.

• YouTube - Star Trek: Captain James T. Kirk Giving some advises - Don’t make me go all evil Captain Kirk on you.
  Tags: startrek

• Prologue Theme Mod with 128 Chars Limit | Play Work Play Studio - I guess some folks really like to know their limits :-)
  Tags: wordpress prologue themes

While in Arizona Matt Thomas and I implemented a new theme that Matt Mullenweg came up with: Prologue. It is a Twitter inspired WordPress theme. Here’s the run down:

• Post new entries right at the top of the page (assuming you are logged in and are allowed to post new entries to the blog)
• Front page shows the most recent post from every user on the blog
• The tags on the sidebar are sorted by most recently used
• All the other stuff in a typical WordPress theme: tag, author and single post pages

For the sidebar there is also a widget for showing the most recently used tags, which allows you to set the title and how many tags you want to show. That will be handy for sites that have many tags, but only want to see the 10 or 15 most recent.

Prologue is completely self contained as a WordPress theme. It’s now available for use on WordPress.com and also works with self hosted WordPress.org installs. If you want to use it with your WordPress.org install you can get it from the public Subversion repository:

http://svn.automattic.com/wpcom-themes/prologue/

I’ve heard a few people request to have a single zip file to download instead of using Subversion. I’ll see what I can do to accommodate those folks, in the meantime I highly recommend learning Subversion for this sort of thing, it will make keeping up to date much easier.