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josephscott

Prologue, A WordPress Theme

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.

UPDATE 9:45am 4 Aug 2008: You can find the latest version of Prologue available for download from the WordPress Theme Directory at http://wordpress.org/extend/themes/prologue.

38 replies on “Prologue, A WordPress Theme”

What a sweet oddball! I set up http://42words.wordpress.com last night and have been thumping it around.

A couple oddities I hope to work on: I created a page and got page titles to display in the sidebar, but when I select one of those I don’t see any of the text that’s in it.
Also, and this is core to the functionality I’d like to see, a post submitted on a page doesn’t display any differently than a post entered on the mainpage.
So right now: neither About nor PlaceHolder display the text they were created with. So they, along with mainpage, display exactly the same.

Now: if pages could carry their own stream … know what I mean?
What I’m getting at is that the “most recent by each contributer” shouldn’t be universal.
Mainpage? yes, of course, that’s the point.
Separate pages? How about “most recent from each contributer on this page”?
Categories? I don’t know … maybe that should dump all posts.

I haven’t looked at the code, so don’t know how you implemented the logic; maybe I’m at counter-purposes with you.

cheers

@joseph I just filed “Prologue fails to sort by category?” in Support … dunno what’s happening there.

FYI: http://42words.wordpress.com/2008/01/29/9/ pretty much sums up my thinking.

FWIW: 3 times I’ve used something kinna/sorta like this; once the global *cough* “search and rescue” system; once the national Telcom order-wire, and one time the SAC/NORAD maintenance net. My point is: there’s something ?what? existential about getting /what you need and /only/ what you need/. “Cognitive ergonomics”, ehh whot?

The beauty of this setup is that it’s supported by your hosting provider. Developing a group Twitter site like Foamee or Politweets is great but you rely on Twitter.com to stay up 24/7 and hope they don’t change their code on you.

-CP

hi joseph..

thank you for this most excellent theme. i’m nearly done setting up a new blog based on it.

question.. the ‘recent tags’ widget in the side bar, the RSS link isn’t formatting right. It’s doing this:

http://domain/blog/archives/tag/macfeed
http://domain/blog/archives/tag/pcfeed

the feed i get when i click either of these is the entire feed for the blog – not a feed based on a certain tag.

if i paste the link and insert a “/” prior to the word “feed”.. it works fine. So, now i’m looking for the place in the code to add the “/”. I’ve taken a couple php classes, and i’ve tried ‘fixing’ this in a few places in your functions.php file.. but i don’t seem to have it right yet. Any pointers?

thank you, again

brian

i took another look at it (functions.php) and fixed it.. perhaps not the best way, but it does work. This happens around line 93, give or take.. i’ve been playing 😉


<a class="rss" href="term_id ); ?>">RSS

should be:


<a class="rss" href="">RSS

working fine.. let me know if there’s another/better way(?)

thanks!

brian

i didn’t think that was going to format right.. ugh.

basically, i changed this:

echo get_tag_feed_link ($tag->term_id)

to:

echo $tag_link . '/feed'

(trying again)

@bhamm –

I’ve checked several blogs running Prologue and so far I haven’t found one that has the problem you describe. The URL for the tag feeds have all been correct. Perhaps there is something else that is going on?

Great! I’d at first installed Mandigo in my website: http://www.enfotainer.com/

Now, with changing the theme now to Prologue, will there be any problem? My site currently is getting good readers just now, so was worried if my installing Prologue I’d be messing up with anything.

Thanks in Advance!
Manish

That is definately a different design for a theme. I like it. Twitter is slowly growing on me. I may use it….

Annie

Hi there,

It’d be nice to have a preview link outside WordPress.org (or maybe add a direct link to your theme there). Also, you might want to use something similar to the WordPress Download link (http://wordpress.org/latest.zip) so you don’t have to change the link each time a new version comes up.

Cheers!

Hi Joseph, I would like to display category axes along side with “tag it” so that users can categorize their posts and easy for me to do marketing about my blog. Please advise. Thank you

@Ed –

You’d have to provide a way for users to select and add categories. Certainly doable, but probably not something that will go into the default Prologue theme at this point.

Hi Joseph,
I just ran into your blog. Probably will use this on my wordpress.com account. But am still waiting if you would post the .zip file so I can safe it on my PC also. Personally don’t really like the Subversion method.
Let me know. Thanks.

________________
i didn’t think that was going to format right.. ugh.

basically, i changed this:

echo get_tag_feed_link ($tag->term_id)

to:

echo $tag_link . ‘/feed’

(trying again)
__________

Thanks!!!!

I have also checked several blogs running Prologue couldn’t replicate the issue. I think I found one that has the problem you describe. The URL for the tag feeds have all been incorrect.

I have also checked several blogs running Prologue couldn’t replicate the issue.

Thanks for the links on this theme. Looks like a good twitter user model. Glad there is another way downloading this than the subversion model.

I’m really liking the idea of being able to just post my new entries right on the page without having to go through the whole dashboard ordeal everytime. Keep up the great work!

I like your prologue theme and think it is really easy to use with the cleaver posting box when you’re logged into your blog.

-Pam

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