Examples of CommentPress

There is a very useful WordPress theme called CommentPress. It was created by the folks at the Institute for the Future of the Book. I came across it about a month ago and made a mental note to go back to the site and download it. I wanted to use it to encourage a collaborative online approach to revising our state ed tech plan. Unfortunately, their site has been down for weeks. So how does one locate a copy of it when the source is down? Well, I went searching everywhere. Here and there I found blog posts about it, but never the downloadable files. I tried emailing the curator at the future of the book, but of course that bounced because their server was down. I tried emailing other folks that seemed to be connected in some way to the project, but their emails bounced too. Finally, Rob Gray of the PETAL project at the University of South Alabama, came to my rescue with a fresh copy of the install files. (Thank you!) And then I discovered that Edublogs has the theme available. I had originally intended to do an install on NHEON.org, but time was running short for me (the conference session for using it is in 3 days). So I set up a blog on Edublogs and started editing away. (Note: ask me if you get stuck because I ran into a few setup issues.)

I didn’t find alot of examples of blogs with CommentPress. I especially wanted to see examples with images, colors, embedded video, etc. That’s when I decided I needed to write this post and start sharing links to the few blogs I have found:

  • PETAL is hosted by the University of South Alabama. They managed to insert the
  • Innovation Nation in the UK has customized CommentPress quite nicely. The site is hosted by a UK government agency called the “Department for Innovation, Universities, and Skills.” If you really like this version, they have a “happy to share on request” link on the bottom of their site.
  • Here’s a journal article called “CommentPress: New (Social) Structures for New (Networked) Texts” which was published as a regular article in the Journal of Electronic Publishing and then also in CommentPress formet.
  • Here’s a white paper called the Evolution of Communication, released by the New Media Consortium. This one also appears to be slightly customized to include the NMC logo below the table of contents.
  • View my CommentPress blog for state tech planning at Edublogs.
  • Other installs? As I said, there are people blogging about CommentPress but I didn’t find too many installs.

The list of installs grows:

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