The Sandbox Goes Live, Gets Minimal
If you’re a WordPress.com user, have a look around the Presentation > Themes menu in your blog dashboard. You’ll notice a new theme: the Sandbox. I’m not going to get into any long-winded tale of how this theme come to be what it is, just that Andy made it really great.
So we decided to drop the “Miniamlist” (in honor of minimalism, I say) and instead go with simple “Sandbox.” Good enough, I say.
Soon the Sandbox will be available for download. I am adding another skin to it, which will be called “Spartan.” I personally hope the Sandbox will inspire other novices to get their feet wet and make their own theme—or skin as we’ll be calling it here. All you’ll need to know is just a little CSS.
Again, the Sandbox isn’t available for download just quite yet, but I promise you can expect it in the next few days—it’ll be right here, in fact. If you have any comments about the Sandbox on WordPress.com, I think you can get in touch with me or Andy.
For now, though, check on some of the people using the Sandbox, look at the source, visit different pages, and soak it in for a moment.
Jimmy wrote:
Congrats on getting in on the Wordpress.com list of themes Scott! Good stuff! Great idea with the skin functionality as well!
Posted 04 Aug 2006 at 4:57 am ¶
sonia wrote:
excellent!
Posted 04 Aug 2006 at 10:41 am ¶
adam wrote:
as soon as i saw andy getting involved, i thought this might be where things were headed. congrats, it’s well deserved.
Posted 04 Aug 2006 at 10:56 am ¶
Scott wrote:
Thanks, all. I’m happy that it’s up on WordPress.com. It’ll be good to get some initial feedback. The Sandbox there will grow a little, too, but I’m really eager to get it ready for download. Soon, though, soon.
Posted 04 Aug 2006 at 11:10 am ¶
Scott wrote:
Ah, and you can always poke around see who’s using the Sandbox so far.
Posted 04 Aug 2006 at 12:32 pm ¶
Ja wrote:
Wow! I’m so psyched Scott! This is giong to be great. Oddly enough, a while back I was sharing a jotspot space with a couple friends where we listed and brainstormed ideas. Amongst my pile full of notes about things I wanted to do if I ever had the time, I wrote:
This isn’t exactly the same, but it’s as close as I’ll ever see and I didn’t even have to do anything.
If this could pick up some of the skinning community it (kickstart it on deviant art
) it could really bring a whole new audience to the mix in addition to the benefits you mentioned.
So do you see the creation of a repository of css snippets to use for different elements? I have a feeling this is going to be a lot of fun.
You may want to take a look at Nybble’s plugin, Side Bar Modules which I managed to convince him during development to include an option for per-module css styling (allowing differnt styled modules to be swapped in and out or used on different pages. I don’t know how you’ve scripted Sandbox but I thought you may be interested in seeing if there are any semantic possibilities with that for the future.
Eagerly waiting your release and hope to see you on the 19th!
Ja
Posted 05 Aug 2006 at 3:08 pm ¶
Bill Humphries wrote:
I was working on a theme with hAtom support and you delivered something with so much more! Excellent work, and I look forward to trying it on my server.
Posted 05 Aug 2006 at 7:37 pm ¶
Stephanie Booth wrote:
Whee! I’d heard about Sandbox, of course, being on WP.com, but I hadn’t realised it used hAtom! I’ve been wanting to hAtomise my site for a while now, and I found this information while googling for a hypothetical hAtom plugin. Of course, hAtom has to do with themes, not plugins.
Posted 09 Sep 2006 at 7:08 am ¶