Gelato CMS

Gelato CMS is an open source implementation of the tumblelog concept, as popularized on Tumblr. I’m a big fan of the Tumblelog concept, it’s not dissimilar to what I do here and on matt.wordpress, but I’d love to see it implemented as a WordPress theme. Hat tip: Ryan.

19 thoughts on “Gelato CMS

  1. hmmmmm….
    i’m having a hard time imagining this as a universalizeable theme.
    sure, you can have different styling for posts that are tagged music, youtube, chat, link, etc., but you’d still need the fauxml plugin for youtube, jquery to add alt classes to chats, etc.
    and since wordpress tags/categories aren’t exclusive, what happens when a post is tagged link and photo?
    it’s a concept of a specific way to blog, not a specific aesthetic. it would mean that you had to choose an aesthetic to get a functionality. in a comment on mine or wank’s blog, you specifically said you didn’t want functionality to impinge on aesthetics.

  2. i guess the summary of my point is this: a user would have to decide what type of post they were going to make. i don’t think that’s something that wordpress does well on the admin side, and i don’t think a theme could solve that. i think that solving the functionality wouldn’t necessarily imply an aesthetic (c.f. the many varied customizations of tumblr). the optimal situation would be a versatile framework, with interchangeable aesthetics. i don’t see that as something that themes should try to solve.

  3. I would just keep it simple. Yes a post could have a link and a video and a quote, but you just ask people not to do that. And what does fauxml have to do with anything?

    If you wanted to be fancy a theme could use its functions.php to add additional simple screens under “write” that are better for entering different types of content, that basically just help out formatting the post. But that’s not at all needed for version 1.0.

    A theme is a great way to test out the concept. Something simple and plaintxt-like with good typography would be easily customizable and if it’s popular then the concept could be expanded to something more generic and applicable to multiple themes.

  4. TumbleJack is a WordPress theme intended for tumblelogs. I haven’t tried it, but it looks pretty nice. I would really like to see a plugin that streamlines the tumblelog workflow as much as Tumblr. I agree with Matt that the category issue isn’t as much of an issue as adam believes.

  5. I’m not too familiar with coding and PHP, but Gelato looks like a simplified version of WP. Its template tags are like those in Cutenews and in Diaryland.

  6. I’ve been looking for a tumblelog theme for ages! 🙂 Thanks to Josh for pointing out TumbleJack. Once I get the personal blog running I’ll definitely be using this!

  7. I got all excited about TumbleJack till I read: “Note that this theme is not built to use all of the features offered through WordPress (like categories, etc.)”

    I want a tumblelog that does tags so I can use it as a sort of content rich del.icio.us. Ideally w/search, too, but that’s easy enough to hack into the template with google custom search.

  8. I noticed a bunch of hits coming from over here and I have to thank Josh for bringing up TJ in response to this post.

    Matt, I have released TJ3, and I hope that you can see that great things can be done with WordPress. Thanks for continuing to develop and improve the platform!

  9. Anybody know where Tumblejack went? The author’s site is more or less MIA – Tumblejack appears to be available at some various WordPress Theme sites but I am a little leery of these types of sites; feeling obligated to check the files for malicious code in some cases seems a dreadful chore.

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