plaintxt.org

A Sandbox revision (0.6.1) has just launched. I could measure the past week in either seven days or by the +0.1.1 change from initial 0.5 release. I’m really looking forward to the letting the dust settle and getting to make a skin or two for it myself. Until then, though, let’s get right to business and “move some sand,” as Andy has been saying.

Changes and Feedback

By far the most requested revision was to do something with those stupid <abbr>’s that followed post titles. Well, we did. Now in the index.php, archive.php, category.php, search.php, and author.php files you have more design-friendly

<div class="entry-date"><abbr class="published">August 13, 2006 – 01:51 am</abbr></div>

Yes, there were some crude ways to style it in IE, but, well, a lot of stuff (like block-level attributes) just wouldn’t work. So, zap, here you are. In the end, we settled on a div.

A great suggestion from Saracen also found its way into the new release: post counting classes. This is different than the ID number of the post. Instead, we added a pn class to posts (and cn for comments). The n is the number relative to the post/comment count.

For example, if you want the first post on any archive page to appear in a big, black box, you could do something like

body.archive div.p1 { background: #000; color: #fff; border: 5px solid red; }

or something to that affect. Then the top-most (the first, from top-to-bottom) post occuring on a page would be big, black, and have a beautiful red border around it. Congratulate the first commenter by making that comment gigantic:

body.single li.c1 { font-size: 3em; }

The possibilities are maddening. So thanks, Saracen. Now we’re all insane.

Another semantics-related aspect of the Sandbox that people commented on were the pipe symbols (|) that appeared in the div.entry-meta sections in the index.php, archive.php, author.php, category.php, and search.php, and in the footer.php as well. What to do. Andy and I tried a few different things.

What we decided on gives skin authors flexibility and looks good in the markup. It degrades well. The pipe symbols remain, but they are wrapped in a span.metasep. You can do all sorts of things with this now.

Finally, we’ve added navigation links to the top and bottom of the loop in the author.php, category.php, index.php, single.php, archive.php, and, uhm, I think that’s it. We’ve given the ones on top an unique id, #nav-above and the ones below (can you guess?) #nav-below. More room for play.

Skins

Ah, the skins. The Sandbox has received some flak for presenting itself as the “end-all, be-all” theme for WordPress. It’s not. It is, however, a great deal of fun to play with and make skins for—not having to think about building structure in the actual theme files or considering any of the PHP code and instead simply designing with CSS is really quite enjoyable.

I’ve seen a few K2 skins for the Sandbox so far, not to mention Adam’s frankly skillful creation of a beautiful Unsleepable skin got me feelin’ positive that the “enjoy, have fun” message had actually been received.

Enjoy. Have fun.

Widgets

It seemed to make sense that if someone wanted a widget in their sidebar, they shouldn’t have to sacrifice the default stuff that was already there. For example, if in Sidebar 2 I wanted to put the recent posts widget there, well, I would also need to place the meta widget there in order to keep the log in/log out links (not to mention wp_meta) as well as the RSS feeds. And in the Sandbox default sidebar, RSS feeds don’t appear under Meta. Why would they?

So we’ve made the Sandbox load its own widgets based on what is in the sidebars by default. In the example above, I could now place the Meta and the RSS Links widgets in Sidebar 2 and get a consistent (for the Sandbox) result. We also added the “« Home” link as a widget, too.

The default contents of Sidebar 1 includes a link that points back to the home page on any page except the home page, i.e., it’s conditional. Why should someone who’s using widgets in Sidebar 1 have to sacrifice this nice, conditional link?

Now there’s a “Home Link” widget whenever the Sandbox is loaded. And now the search widget is exactly like the default one. Remember that the RSS Links and Home Link widgets only appear when the Sandbox is the activated theme.

Of course, I’m happy to share the Home Link widget, though the only difference with it and placing a link in a text widget is that this one is conditional. Big whoop.

hAtom

Finally, there’s hAtom. An intersting thread on hAtom appeared on WordPress.com. Someone asked the very reasonable question, “What is hAtom and why is it important?” She got her answer.

I followed some of the talk about hAtom and found that an hAtom-enabled version of Kubrick had already been made. That’s two themes out of, uhm, well, a lot.

I’ve been playing with the hAtom to Atom converter, converting themes using the Sandbox into Atom. But I’m literally converting the actual blog! How great is that.

I also forsee a “Subscribe to hAtom” widget for the Sandbox, Strangelove, and other themes using hAtom. The hAtom to Atom converter (link above) could be used easily, as Bill pointed out in an email to me; for example (no breaks),

http://www.lukearno.com/projects/hatom2atom/?ctype=
application%2Fxml&amp;tidy=yes&amp;url=<?php echo urlencode(get_bloginfo('url')); ?>

But honestly this is down the road. So what are you going to do now that you’ve subscribed to hAtom. It’s still a draft, but it holds tremendous potential, by making external, separate feeds redundant. This dream, however, lies at the end of a long and dangerous road. Maybe the Technorai Kitchen will add hAtom.

Drumroll . . . SVN

Come and get it, ladies and gentlmen. You can look, but not touch. If you’re interested in following the changes to the Sandbox, you can acccess Sandbox repo at svn://skeltoac.homelinux.net/sandbox/ and you’ll need a client. This will be helpful for skin authors to stay abreast of changes (this is 0.6.1 after all) though I imagine structural changes have slowed down.

That’s it. Let us know what you think.