#wordpressdotcom

Here’s a radically cool update from all of us at Automattic; this past month, we held our first-ever company-wide hackathon. Titled Radical Speed Month, we ventured forth in hundreds of two-person teams to build and ship passion projects across our universe of brands, including Tumblr.

One project worth spotlighting is Social, a new theme from the WordPress.com crew for quick posts, replies, and reblogs. The Social theme creates a space on your website for all those personal updates that are not a tweet, not yet a blog post. Sound familiar?

When you create a site with WordPress.com/social, you’re greeted by a feed-like interface with a profile page, a home page, and an explore page. Hit compose to write a post, or reblog someone else’s post from your feed to your profile, which has a custom URL that anyone can subscribe to.

A while ago our #Automattic CEO @photomatt did a poll among our company’s team leads on their recommended reads. The result of that survey can be found on this page.

I’ve read a few of the books on that list and can especially recommend Drive, Radical Candor, and Crucial Conversations.

This is a pretty huge deal! For context, WordPress.com is another Automattic product where you can create a more professional looking site, shop, or blog (though, how professional is entirely up to you of course 😏). And previously, the ability to accept payments beyond simple donations required a paid plan.

Now, folks even on the free plan can accept payments for a variety of things, like gated content, subscriptions, products, services, and more! The first heading in the post sums it up perfectly, "Starting from scratch, not starting from zero."

It's officially live, again.