Houston, we have lift off

Written by Matty Cohen on November 1, 2013 Blog, Product News.

At Woo, we love P2. Much like how P2 changed the way Automattic runs, it revolutionised internal communications at Woo and is a tool we use every day, on the platform we love most… WordPress!

Over the years, P2 has become a noun and a common way of referring to an “internal Twitter”, as it were. Many useful plugins have also been developed, specifically for use with P2, to add functionality such as “likes” on posts, setting a “resolved” status for each post (useful for support questions) or clocking in at your digital office, powered by P2.

What about child themes for P2?

Today, we’re proud to announce Houston, our child theme for P2.

Meet Houston

houston

Houston is an internal project, started by James Koster, to redesign our P2 theme (where we spend a large portion of our days) and turn the standard look and feel of a P2 on it’s head just a little bit.

Over the past few months, Houston has been tweaked, pushed and prodded to best suit our WooThemes workflow. The theme has also undergone a full review by the WordPress.org theme review team and, as of right now, is available on WordPress.org for free download!

houston-mobile

A very neat responsive layout

Houston is for everyone

Do you use P2 at work or for personal projects, and want a new look? Do you want to use P2, yet aren’t too keen on the default theme?

Houston is for you.

We’re really proud to share Houston with the WordPress community and of where the project came from (scratching our own itch). We look forward to seeing Houston in the wild and hearing feedback about how Houston helps you in your business.

Download Houston Free Today
Houston in action on the WooThemes Internal P2 site.
Houston in action on the WooThemes Internal P2 site.

Contributing

If you use Houston we’d love to hear about it. And if you notice and bugs, please feel free to open an issue on the github repository.

cta-banner-10-product-page-v2_2x

19 Responses

  1. Maria
    November 1, 2013 at 3:55 pm #

    I love the new theme you made James! So nice across the board from my laptop to my phone. Stellar work as always!! 🙂

  2. erlend_sh
    November 1, 2013 at 4:20 pm #

    A great contribution to the ecosystem! I hope this will carry on with the upcoming o2 plugin.

  3. allmyhoney
    November 1, 2013 at 5:26 pm #

    Just a great job as always. Clean and simple to use. Any demo of this guys – or is it a case of download and try it out?

    • Ryan Ray
      November 1, 2013 at 7:04 pm #

      We should create a demo on our demo site. 😛

      The only thing currently available is the preview on WordPress.org, or as you said download and play!

  4. Timmy
    November 2, 2013 at 1:34 am #

    Looks absolutely awful… Just terrible.

    • James Koster
      November 2, 2013 at 2:33 am #

      Thanks Timmy, have a great weekend 🙂

  5. Gary
    November 2, 2013 at 5:07 am #

    I’d love to see a blog post about how P2 fits into your workflow at Woo.

    What do you use it for? Does it fill a project management role? That sort of thing.

    Cheers.

    • Mark Forrester
      November 2, 2013 at 9:00 am #

      An old blog post, but some insight into P2 and our workflow – http://woo.com/2009/08/real-time-productive-communication/

      I think it’s time we follow up with an update. Stay tuned.

      • Tevya
        November 3, 2013 at 4:57 am #

        Excellent! I’ll look forward to it.

  6. Exire
    November 4, 2013 at 12:20 pm #

    Wonderful design. Really nice looking!

    The only thing I wish was possible, was to use a ~1200px two-column layout (content + sidebar).
    We consider using P2 for our intranet, but I just realized its rather narrow, so a lot of content won|t fit easily in it (lik wide tables :P)

    • James Koster
      November 4, 2013 at 11:38 pm #

      You could easily disable the largest layout by removing some CSS. That way your site will appear in a 2 column layout all the way down to handheld size.

  7. Eliran
    November 4, 2013 at 7:33 pm #

    Beautiful theme! Awesome designed, and works best everywhere. Keep this great job up!

  8. andriy07
    November 4, 2013 at 7:59 pm #

    AWESOME!! i’ve installed it right away. i just have some questions, and I’ll use the support area for that. thank you.

  9. entirix
    November 6, 2013 at 9:32 pm #

    Amazing theme, I was bored with previous P2. Thanks a lot 😀

  10. njosh
    November 8, 2013 at 12:59 pm #

    Amazing job guys.
    But I miss there the possibility to add titles for the posts and upload pictures.

  11. Kangarooo
    November 9, 2013 at 4:53 am #

    DOes this work multilanguage? Like people can choose language they want to post to and they dont mix but are seperated. When opens english then doesnt sees posts and comments from french?

  12. kim
    November 12, 2013 at 4:54 pm #

    We’ve started using it. Beautiful.

    Two feedbacks:

    1. When writing a post, extend the width of textarea on focus. Otherwise, it feels a little cramped.
    2. Impossible to add media in a post? Ouch, that’s needed.

  13. Renato Mendes
    November 24, 2013 at 4:21 pm #

    Limitado ao quesito de colaboradores postar… digo, a falta de coisas básicas como.. a inserção de links, imagens…

  14. Jacob
    December 17, 2013 at 1:51 pm #

    This looks great. I’ve been looking to use P2 internally at our company, but it’s pretty ugly and I don’t have the time to spend on prettying it up, but this looks perfect.

    Just a couple of points of feedback:
    – The keyboard icon and the popup when you click it seem to suggest some sort of keyboard navigation, but none of the keys are doing anything for me.
    – The compose area on the front-end only does Status format posts. I’d like to at least have a title field, and add media would be nice.
    – The widgets underneath the compose box go above the posts after a certain point. It would be preferable if they went underneath. Though I could see this being a challenge without also putting the compose box underneath also.
    – If there’s a lot of widgets in the Beneath Post Box widget area, they will overlap the footer when you scroll to the bottom.