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DisneyParks.com now has a blog–and that’s awesome. Props to @ThomasSmith and the whole @DisneyParks team.

Here’s is a random list of notes about their blog, both technical and not.

• They use WordPress (dot org version, they don’t seem to be a wordpress.com VIP). Not sure what Disney’s history is using open-source software, but rock on! I used and loved WP at TechCrunch.
• They moderate comments, and you have to signup for some type of Disney kind of non-WP user-account system.
• They use Feedburner for both RSS & Email. See http://feeds.feedburner.com/disneyparks.
• Looks like the WP theme was developed externally. If you check out one of their WP theme css files:
  

  Theme Name: Disney Parks
  Description: A custom WordPress theme developed by voce_connect.
  Version: 1.0
  Author: Pete Schiebel

  Here’s Pete Schiebel’s bio on Voce Communications site. They did a great job–the frontend looks great.

• Twitter integration! Disney has been promoting their twitter accounts hard: at the D23 Expo, they plastered their @DisneyD23 account everywhere–and it was super useful for news and annoucements. For the blog, they slurp in the @DisneyParks tweet stream and rotate through underneath the header. They also use CoTweet for managing their Twitter account internally.
• They use WP-PostRatings for rating each post.
• They use both tags and categories for their posts. They even organized their categories hierarchically! Very cool. See the Archives Page.
• They’ve embedded a bunch of nice, branded videos using Viddler. My guess is that they’ve got a pretty big account.
• If you refresh the homepage, you’ll notice they rotate their header image. There’s actually 48 different headers (here’s the first, just keep increasing the number at the end of the URL to 48). The header images are really well done.

Overall, it’s great to see Disney using open-source software, embracing blogging standards, and use a variety of web services. And as a fan, I’d love to see some cool guest posts on the blog!