For those of you who haven’t yet tried it, P2 is an awesome micro blogging theme with quick front end posting, live ajax updating, and inline threaded comments. It already packs a big punch.
So how can an already great theme be taken to the next level? That was the task of Team 34 at this year’s Automattic retreat.
One of the first areas we thought could be improved was the ease of customization. Most people like to add their own personal touch to a theme, currently P2 is hard to customize beyond the standard design. We’ve added new options to allow you to hide the sidebar and even set a unique header image. All these options allow you to personalize your own P2 to match your tastes.
We’ve also introduced post types into P2. Now you can post different types of content and have them formatted and displayed in a way that fits the content beautifully. There are settings for standard posts, single images and galleries, as well as links and quotes. Selecting which post type to use is as simple as clicking the correct tab above the post box.
We also decided to go a step further and rework P2 so that it could easily be used as a parent theme and extended with child themes. 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. We’ve also added a large number of template based hooks that will allow plugin developers to hook into the theme and output extended functionality.
The new P2 theme is now live on WordPress.com, and also available for download from the WordPress.org theme repository. However for .org users, P2 requires WordPress 2.9 beta or greater.
WordPress.com News 
interesting..
i like it, but maybe never will i use
Hmmm, I still like my theme better – or – so far… but I’ll need to check this out a bit more.
Whoa, really cool! Need to check this out for sure! Thanks guys!
Very pleased by the changes. It’s always bothered me how “themes” are used for the basic functionality (see also CommentPress, for example) making it difficult to choose the actual theme, or look, that you want. Allowing child themes gets around that problem.
Two things that I would request for the next update: taggable comments (not just posts), and more levels of replies to replies.
Whether or not you Tweet, the P2 theme is a keeper. My readers love the look and that’s all it matters really—like the human complexion, good skin always creates long lasting first impressions. 🙂 Throw in beautifully presented photographs and you get the whole nine yards 🙂
Congratulations and well done WORDPRESS !
I think allowing titles in blog post-style quickposts is a major advance. Well done!
It’s great~~ Thanks for the creator
i like it… menn
thankyou..
looks nice im going to download it.
lots of AJAX i guess …
wow… innovative!!!
I’m new to wordpress, and if P2 can make it faster for me, then it’s all good.
Wow, thank you for this information. Maybe I will use it in the future.
It’s getting easy to manage. Simple but great.
Happy new year !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
cool stuff!
Really good
Is there a way to change the categories from “status” or “post” to something else? I can’t find that piece of code.
Oh! its Cool.
Does rather remind me of the Facebook interface… Not a bad thing!
Hi,
I installed P2 Version 1.1.1 for WP.org on cheap hosting server, and it kills all the server resources. I had to disable it and replace it with another theme.
You had me at “cheap hosting.” It’s designed so that every client pings for updates every 10-20 seconds, if you’re on a bad server this will add up.
Good job – the threaded, inline comments are cool.
haha nice idea, good job 😉
thanks for this amazing theme.