Sandbox Now Available
It may have been a first: bloggers on WordPress.com got the first shot at a theme, before the rest of the world. And now the Sandbox theme is available to everyone. Get it on the Sandbox page.
Now, what’s the big deal with the Sandbox? What can you do with it? Pardon me while I quote the readme.html (which I hope you all read):
- You can just install it, have a super-cool minimalist theme, and be done with the whole thing.
- You can skin it with CSS alone—no need to edit any of the Sandbox theme files.
- You can steal the functions, markup, theme files, et al, as pleases you.
- You can use it as a good place to learn a few things about CSS, XHTML, and PHP, perhaps.
Again, it’s really a great theme for a beginner to start learning and applying CSS. For those of you a bit beyond that, the sheer number of selectors and their nature (dynamic) will give you tremendous breadth in creating a rich design.
Skins
There has been some talk about what to do with skins for the Sandbox. Well, I’d like to say right from the beginning, that I am planning on creating a list of skins, and mentioning them when they come my way. Andy and I are both eager to see what people come up with.
I have already gotten more than a few emails about a possible “Sandbox Skins” competition. This has been mentioned on the forums and elsewhere more than once. I’m thinking that the best thing to do is support Thomas and his competition.
For now, though, I’ll say that it’s hasn’t been ruled out. My Magic 8 Ball says, “Cannot predict now.” So check back later. 
On WordPress.com
If you’re using the Sandbox on WordPress.com and interested in customizing your theme, you’ll need to get the “Custom CSS” ugrade. And if you need any help creating a custom CSS stylesheet for the Sandbox, read the readme.html file (it’s at the bottom of the Sandbox Skins submenu).
Zeo wrote:
Well done, especially with the hAtom support. I think you should wrap <abbr> tags with span or something since it never exist in IE6 and below. As as a result, it would be difficult to style it.
<?php the_time('Y-m-d\TH:i:sO'); ?>should save you some space.Posted 06 Aug 2006 at 2:31 pm ¶
Scott wrote:
Hey Zeo: That’s a fine observation and one I noticed myself; the trick is the
abbrinherits the styles of the parent element, so you have to style that the way you want the date to look. Definitely will keep it in mind, though.And good suggestion with the
\T.Posted 06 Aug 2006 at 7:06 pm ¶
Scott wrote:
Oh, and Lorelle of WordPress.com fame is creating a list classes that occur in the Sandbox and giving it some structure. Should be interesting to see this develop, and with the readme.html we should have a thorough set of documents.
From Lorelle: All the Styles for the Sandbox theme
(Note to self: blog about this properly.)
Posted 07 Aug 2006 at 12:59 am ¶
Chris Harrison wrote:
Nicely done. I’m going to play around with it a bit. I like what I’ve seen so far, though.
Posted 07 Aug 2006 at 4:29 pm ¶
Ja wrote:
WTG Scott! You’re finally earning your keep for that Technorati ranking now.
Kidding.
But the theme is generating some talk on the microformats mailing-list as well as just about every other blog of WP enthusiasts, so I think that officially bumps you up to rockstar status. Well, minus the underaged girls… I hope.
So, have you thought about working on a plugin/script for newbies to modify parts of skins (to a certain extent) without even having to know CSS?
Should I ever get around to finally putting together my own theme that I’ve had stuck in my head since I started using WP, I’ll be following your markup standards, well pending when I actually do it and what what WP 2.1 brings to the table.
hAtom is a nice fit… but it’s just all so beautiful (not that there isn’t more to be expanded upon).
If you do get enough people doing skins they want to share, I’d suggest putting them in some sort of repository. Wiki/lists can be useful but for smaller things they tend to get outdated as the links change and generally call for higher maintenance.
Cheers to you and Andy!
Ja
Posted 07 Aug 2006 at 6:26 pm ¶
Scott wrote:
Hey Ja: Thanks for the nice words. I’m thinking the same thing about a Wiki, but waiting to see where things go. I mean, I just released it, oh, 36 hours ago.
Yes, I’m pleased.
Posted 07 Aug 2006 at 9:08 pm ¶
Mike wrote:
Awesome stuff, as usual. One oddity: I installed the theme, enabled it in WP, and selected my skin. But now my Sidebar Widgets option is gone under Presentation. That makes me sad
Any ideas?
Posted 07 Aug 2006 at 11:43 pm ¶
Mike wrote:
Okay, never mind. I just upgraded my widgets plugin from 1.0 to 1.0.20060711, and that fixed it. Before I tried deactivating and reactivating, which didn’t seem to help. Just a heads up for other slow-to-upgrade people like myself.
Posted 07 Aug 2006 at 11:51 pm ¶
Greg wrote:
Out of curiosity, why did you use the abbr tag to wrap the date? I’ve looked at the workarounds for styling within IE, but it makes for some rough CSS. Wouldn’t it have been better to have a span with a class inside the abbr tag? I’ve never seen the abbr tag used in this way? Other than that… beautiful!
Posted 08 Aug 2006 at 6:08 pm ¶
Scott wrote:
The
<abbr class="published" ... >is a part of the hAtom specification. As I mentioned above, you can style it with good success by giving the parent element attributes that the child, thisabbr, would inherit.Posted 08 Aug 2006 at 8:17 pm ¶
Zeo wrote:
I still can’t figure it out, how could it inherit if the tag doesn’t exist even in DOM. Show me some light!
Posted 08 Aug 2006 at 9:59 pm ¶
Björn Lindström wrote:
Even using widgets for Sidebar 1, there’s a bunch of sections that seem to be hardcoded (Search, Links, Feeds and Meta). In effect you’re forced to have those, admittedly useful, below all the widgets.
Since this makes the ordering of widgets somewhat illogical on my page, it would be nice if the sidebar were completely empty aside from widgets, when widgets are used.
Posted 14 Aug 2006 at 10:35 pm ¶
Scott wrote:
Hey Bjorn: No, none the sidebar contents are hardcoded. Using widgets, you can entirely replace the contents of both sidebars.
In the 0.6.1 release of the Sandbox, I added Sandbox-style widgets to match the default contents. These are loaded into the widgets pallete for choosing, but they’re not hardcoded.
It is interesting, though, to consider having blank sidebars and require widgets to be used for results. Interesting.
Posted 15 Aug 2006 at 12:03 am ¶
Björn Lindström wrote:
I figured out what I did wrong. I assumed that only sidebar 1 was used by a 2-column skin, but it turns out it uses both sidebars piled over each other.
Thus the widgets sidebar 2, which I hadn’t put any of my widgets in, used the default values. Moving some widgets over to sidebar 2 fixed it.
Anyway, I don’t think it would be too far out for a theme to require using widgets, as soon as the widgets plugin comes with WordPress, which is something I understand is in the works.
Posted 15 Aug 2006 at 1:03 am ¶
Martin McCallion wrote:
Hi, sorry to add to this so long after the original posting, and I also sorry if it’s the wrong place to post a report of an apparent bug. Please point me in the right direction if appropriate.
Anyway, I’ve just installed Sandbox on my blog, and I can’t select any skin but the one that was active by default. That is, I see the installed skins on the “Sandbox Skins” admin page, but whatever one I click on, nothing changes. The default “Two-Column Minimalist L” remains in place.
Also, I love this live comment preview. How do you do that?
Posted 04 Oct 2006 at 8:22 pm ¶
Martin McCallion wrote:
Never mind, I discovered that you have to be at WP 2.0.3 or above. I upgraded to 2.0.4, and it now works.
I’d still like to know how the comment preview is done, though.
Posted 05 Oct 2006 at 5:44 pm ¶