My main focus over the last few days has been integration between the plugins, themes, and applications that we have been using to build Author Buzz with.

I have always felt that developers should also be end users. Not power users but regular joe users. If you have to work and play with the product of your labour it informs so many aspects of what you do and stops you becoming detached from the end results of your work.

That’s why I have an account on Author Buzz. Over on Matthew D. Brown (Author) – my own blog for my own writings – I have been playing with the shiny new toys and learning what works (and what does not).

What works very well is that when I blog, on any blog, it updates my activity stream. That’s a win.

What sort of works is the writing, book, taxonomy system. It works but there are a few caveats. Not least of which is that the entries are not showing up in the stream. That’s not a win but I think I can fix that. I’ve reached out tot he original plugin authors to see what the best way was to contribute to their project.

What does not work is the theme. Well, it works, but it is not exactly stunningly attractive yet. Fortunately, that is not a total fail. We knew going in that there would not be a perfect theme out of the box and we expected that sooner or later we would have to start making child themes. Sooner, it seems.

Another thing to come out of testing is that not all themes are created equal and while some look nice we may need to create Author Buzz child theme versions for most themes. That may leave us creating an Author Buzz plugin or two to carry the functionality common to our needed changes.

These are all updates we need to make before the blogging features we want to offer are available out of the box for new users.

Back to the grindstone for me.