The team templatic is growing and simple emails can’t really be of use to keep everyone updated. Project Management tools like BasecampHQ are widely popular for bigger project/task management. But we needed a very simple tool that serves as private blog + a twitter like place to update status on multiple things so the team members are aware of what’s going on – without wasting time on things like creating projects, creating and managing tasks and so on.
Fortunately, wordpress.org have created P2 theme that enables blog admin and authors to quickly create twitter like miniposts without going to backend. A perfect tool that can be installed and used within 10 minutes.
- Install wordpress
- Install P2 theme
- Create users as authors so they can also write posts from your blog front.
And it’s done. A perfect tool to collaborate in less than 10 minutes.
We needed privacy
However, we needed to keep the blog private . For this, all we needed to do was to implement something that asks a user to log-in before they can access the blog. There are many advanced plugins for this but simplicity is the key and we chose members-only plugin because it did just that.
That was it. We had our own private blog where all of our team members can post quick updates, report bugs, provide suggestions and so on. As simple as you’d post a tweet.
Some additional functionality and simple looks
We wanted keep this blog simple as saving time is one of our main goal. But I liked the simple and usable looks of the basecamp project management software. On the Sunday morning, I couldn’t resist and made some quick css changes and voila, within 2 hours, we have a private collaborative tool that looks like a basecamp product ( though, we kept the fonts default helvetica instead of lucida grande used at basecamp).
We were happy with the private blog but needed 2 more features that are very essential in collaborating
- File upload/sharing and
- Notification to the user(s) on some important updates that need their immediate attention.
We requested Vipul, our programming master to do this which he coded in few hours.
And that’s it. Now we think that we have a perfect tool that comes handy when providing an update on diffferent things being developed at templatic. And we do not plan to add any more functions as we mentioned before – simplicity is the key.
Share
It’d be great to know what tools do you use to manage tasks/projects? Your experiences and thoughts on simple project management. Please share via comments.
You may download it too!
Because you demanded, we’ve made this theme available for download. Please check this post and grab the theme for yourselves.
Seems like a great and useful tool. That’s something I always wanted to implement in my company, but P2 misses some features that would make it really useful! And you just added them!
An additional sidebar box with the tag list would make it the perfect tool for me! Would you release it? *dreams
Yep, we will release it next week. Tags etc. are wp widgets, simply drag and drop into the sidebar and they will be there.
Great! Can’t wait for it, thank you!
About the email notifications, is that something you do with a plugin, or can the emails be customized somehow? It would be great to be able to add the tags in the subject line, and the post content in the body of the email for example…. For I guess it can always be customized! :)
we wrote a custom script for the notifications. Nope, you can’t edit the email. It’s simply an alert on the update. e.g. “a new status has been added at our blog. Please check [link here]” kind of emails. We wanted to keep it simple, remember?
Looks great!
I think you should put this P2 theme up for a free download in this post and save us the hassle of copying you ;)
Why do you have navigation links at the top? Wouldn’t it be better to make the header as small as possible, to make space for important stuff?
How do the notifications work, are they simply e-mail notifications?
No need to copy as we’ve planned to release this for free. Only thing is, we need to make it release ready ( css fixing etc.)
The top navigation is kept for this purpose only. We knew we wanted to release it and thats why the navigation is coded. if you don’t have pages, navigation would not appear. Same goes for tagline, if it’s not there, it won’t appear, saving you space in the header.
Notifications are simply email alerts that tells “this post has been added [link] that you should check out.” This assures me that the intended person will check it out for sure.
Notice the tiny navigation at the top right? Sometime, you need to add titles in the post or, add some bulleted lists etc. and that link comes handy at that time.
Yeah very cool, and thanks for releasing! We’d like to use the functionality that you coded into Show Options :)
I did some light CSS modding on our P2 too, to make it look stylish like yours ;)
http://www.jepson.no/u/4fqdvt.png
you are real quick. Love the looks.
yeah, the delay in release is due to this reason. We need to give options on
- is this blog private?
- disable file attachments
- disable user notifications
team templatic is working on another theme release and hence the delay. this P2 mod will be available next week
Very nice. I like the members-only plugin idea. We played around with P2 as a means for internal communication and updates and had a hard time working out the privacy issue. We used ours also, to autopost “shared bookmarks” from delicious, but taking it private through cPanel access, like we did, made the autopost of delicious bookmarks stop working. I wonder if the members only plugin would allow for that. I’ll have to give it a try.
Simple email notification of new posts is perfect. That was another issue we kept trying to figure out how to overcome.
And file uploads are definitely a big plus!!
Looks like you’ve done a great job. I look forward to seeing the release.
Kevin
hey baby, where is the e commerce theme?
Nice job guys. File sharing is one of the big things I was hoping to see in P2. I can’t wait for this release :) Add in the email notifications and it’s perfect!
thanks everyone for the encouraging words. We’ve released this theme with built-in functions. Check it here http://templatic.com/freethemes/gtd-%E2%80%93-private-blog-theme-for-teams-to-collaborate
It really looks like the twitter theme.