During WordCamp New York, I and many others had the chance to view a demo of the new P2 theme that will be released to WordPress.org users in due time. It’s already live for WordPress.com users in case you use that system. The New P2 improves on the first version by adding support for custom post types. For example, the theme has built in content types for a blog post, status updates, quotes, or links. These specific content types can be designed to give each an individual style. The first thing that comes to my mind when I saw this in action was Tumblr which does a great job styling the various types of content you have to choose from. Custom post types will be available in WordPress 2.9.
The new P2 has also been reworked from the ground up so that it can be used as a parent theme and then extended with child themes. Andy Peatling says:
This will allow theme designers to create awesome new theme designs without having to duplicate all of the existing P2 features. We’ve streamlined the HTML of the theme so that it is much more flexible for creating new designs using CSS.
Although it’s not shown in the screenshots, I was told that the new P2 will contain media uploading so that images can be added to posts. This is something that was heavily requested after the first version of P2 was released. For more screenshots and to read Andy’s write up, check out this post on the WordPress.com blog and keep an eye out for the release of the new P2 on the theme repository.
Pretty sure WordPress.org users can get it already.
Ooooh I want to try it out now! Yes I know patience is a virtue…blah blah blah.
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Look closely, media uploading *is* shown in the screenshot 🙂
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An improvement I would like to see with WordPress is to support the differentiation of a post’s status once it is published. This is to identify if a post has had a major update or a minor update. A post may have had a major update or revision due to newer information being available or may have just suffered a minor update due to some semantic issues like a missed grammar error being rectified or a link or metatag being added.
The major update may have many of the paragraphs altered with a huge difference in word count whereas the minor update may have a small difference in word count. By differentiation the classes of update, it may help with controlling “ping-out” behaviour or can help even further with the blog’s SEO. It could also include re-publishing at a later date an article that had undergone major revision or improvement work.
The reason I would like to improve on this is because whenever I post something on the blog, I may want to revise it at a later date either to deal with an error or, in some cases, to deal with technological or marketplace differences.
I’m looking at setting up a BuddyPress project soon, and I think the new P2 will be a really good complement for the site (a site for our extended family to keep up with each other and post photos).