It seems that we've got a recurring theme in our portfolio. That is, development on social media projects for some really big brands. They're a product of the amazing vision of our good friends at Voce Communications mixed with the talent of our developers here at cnp_studio. IMHO we've made some beautiful music together and thanks to the incredible people involved we get to share some of that with everyone. Now, where to start?

Partnership

You know what it's like when someone gets you and you get them? You get one of those "Where have you been all my life?" feelings? That's what it's been like working with Mike, Josh and the others at Voce on these projects. To say they understand the industry is an understatement which is why I'm extremely excited to announce that we're officially partnering with Voce for all things social media. Consider the gap between strategy and implementation bridged. This really is only a formality for what has already been a great relationship. We're stoked to make it public. Read more from Voce's side of things here.

Plugin Release

So for PlayStation.Blog we've done quite a bit of customization to the WordPress install on the site. We use several existing plugins on the blog including WP-Polls, WP-Cache, WordPress Download Monitor and others. A couple of needs though left us without a plugin to fill the void. So, we created our own. And it's because of the great people at Sony and Voce that we get to release these plugins back to the WordPress community. Sweet.

Image-Rotator Plugin

If you look at the homepage of the PlayStation blog you'll see a main image header that they use to promote any number of things. We had originally created a simple manager to allow them to quickly upload these images and set a URL where the image should link, but they wanted to take this one step further and release it back to the community. Who were we to argue? So with some tweaks we made it into the plugin that you can read about/download here. Install it, add the line of code where you'd like the rotation to appear and you're set (oh and don't forget to add some images).

Author Comment Reply Plugin

The threaded comments plugin existed, but nothing that limited it strictly to authors replying to comments. Our fear, especially in the case of the PlayStation blog, was that the threaded comments would get out of hand. That, and it's not a discussion board, so we wanted to avoid that feel. This plugin allows authors to keep their response tied directly to the comment they're replying to without having to put the "@name" in order to reference back to previous posts. If you have a high volume of comments on your blog you'll find this one helpful. Read more about and download it here.