Michael Kimb Jones

Over 6 months ago I started the WordPress 360 project. I mentioned the project here on my blog in an attempt to gain some advice/backing from the WordPress community. Turns out it was advice which ended up putting the project on the back burner for quite some time.

Originally I hoped to start a WordPress themed blog/tutorial site which would give new WordPress users and developers a good starting point for their projects.

I planned on releasing a series of basic themes, doing video tutorials and recommending plugins and the like.

My ideas for the site were dashed when it dawned on me that WordPress 360 would be useless. I soon worked out, with help from the WP community, that there are already 100s of these sites around the web. And probably more to come.

I faced the prospect that my site would become a quiet voice in the static that is the WP network.

I also faced other set backs. Turns out you can’t use the term ‘WordPress’ in your site title as its a trademark held by Automattic (not that this stops some sites).

Also, the whole WP theme market was quickly changing. WPDesigner died a death, Adii and Co started WooThemes and Justin Tadlock started ThemeHybrid off the back of his now famous Options theme.

Elsewhere ThemeShaper shook the WP themeing world by introducing the wonderful Thematic Framework and its excellent child theme options. Something which I for one saw as probably the most interesting movement in the WP world (other than the launch of 2.5 of course).

So, for the past few moths I’ve sat back. Took on some other projects, redesigned my blog (still work in progress) and looked around for other ideas. I also got married, but that’s another story

Then, after 5 months of “comning soon” I actually got around to doing something with the WP360.org domain.

I’ve always been a fan of POPURLS and when I saw the OneNews theme from Ericulous it just made sense to throw together a POPURLS-style WordPress site with feeds from a few choice sites.

After a little more work I added a Google powered search engine which crawles and tracks the sites I have featured on the site homepage, not a difficult task thanks to their great new ‘AdSense for Search‘ service.

All of this is just temporary but has given be some ideas as to where to go next.

What Next

I belive what the WP community needs is a site like the nascent effort I have put together.

Somewhere where a WP user/developer can visit and see at a glance what’s going on in the WP network. A site built around feeds, search and features.

• Feeds from the ‘top’ WP sites out there.
• A Google powered search engine which can find plugins, themes and tutorials, help and tips. Something which will be a vast improvement on simply googleing or using the official WP site search engine (face it, its terrible).
• And finally, features, the only original content to be included on the site. These could be theme reviews, screencasts (something I’m a bug fan of), opinions and news.

Work is in hand to achive all of this. As soon as I have the time. Its never easy creating a site to be proud of when I have so many other things on my plate so for now, the current mish-mash will have to do!