That is the link to the post author attached to each post. Since these don’t make much sense for single-writer blogs, I’m thinking Sandbox should have a toggle that would let the user turn the display of that off.

One might want to make that a general “single writer” option, also removing some other stuff that makes no sense for those kinds of blogs, though I can’t think of anything else.

I love your minimalist themes and your site in general. I looked through the comments and 99% of it went right over my head, and yes, I am a rank beginner blogger boldly planning to download your theme, probably sandbox, and host it on dreamhost. Probably foolish for a beginner but what the heck. I’ll give you better feedback once I get up and running. Maybe I should say, if.

For IE, though, try changing the width of the comment box from a percetage (66%) to a fixed or em-based width, for elasticity, e.g., textarea#comment { width: 15em; }. See if that doesn’t help.

LOVE your theme. Its amazing!

The comment bar moves appears all the way to the right side of the screen (intersecting with my two left-side columns) when in IE 6.0.

Meanwhile In Firefox the comment box keeps scrolling to the right when your text hits the end of the box (when you are trying to type a comment.

I am using the ‘Three-Column Minimalist R 1.0″ sandbox skin.

I’m brand new in CSS and trying to figure out how to solve the issue…

Not sure if anyone else has an issue with the Sandbox theme comments box, but in some browers it moves all the way to the right passing through my two right-side sidebars.

Drives me nuts but I have no idea how to fix it…

single.php:10 single.php:48
%link »

single.php:9 single.php:47
« %link

(What I can see from editing my PO files.)

Thanks for the well thought out reply and considering all of these suggestions!

Hmm.. I definitely see your issue with the .entry-meta. I don’t have a spare braincell to work on it right now, but if I do think of any feasible alternatives I’ll let you know.

As far as widgets and side bar modules, I have to apologize for the misunderstanding. I was under the impression that default behaviour of sandbox would block aspects of SBM but I was mistaken… I just tried it out and it actually works wonderfully together. I wasn’t suggesting the theme be more like K2 or anything like K2, though now that I think about it both have a couple things in common: ease of use for the beginner and power for the more experienced user. K2 works great and supports integrated styling of many popular plugins so it’s easy for new users right out of the box (they also have css styling via schemes). Sandbox makes it extremely for the new user to customize the look of the theme through skins and css changes. The difference is that K2 has become more of a hacker’s theme while Sandbox gets its powers from strong semantics and tons of selectors. My aim is to see that Sandbox doesn’t become a commonly modded theme like K2 or the skinning concept will deteriorate I fear. Do you see where I’m coming from with that? Oh, and yes, it just so happens that despite the huge difference in approaches, K2 and Sandbox are the themes that appeal to me the most far and away.

In thinking about it there may be confusion as to whether Sandbox is a building-block theme as the original intention of its predecessor or a CSS Zen-Garden style type thing for skinning… or both. Heck, I’m pretty positive it’s the latter and you’re focused on sticking to the semantics, standards, and styling extensibility… but even I’m not sure.

Anyhow, if you do give further thought to any of the things I mentioned, I think the accessibility considerations would be the best to return to at some point. I’ll likely give you a couple example skins eventually.

And I agree the idea with about a css editor is terrific and could be wonderful used as a learning tool!

Sorry for writing too much. It’s a bad habit.

JÄ?

It also seems evident that how the Sandbox uses skins will change—for something simpler, but yet known. Here are some more specific comments:

@Zeo: The .entry-summary class is a part of the hAtom specification, so I don’t see why not. I think instances of «/» will just get zapped. The blog tagline is not a quotation, so we’ll leave it as a div. Thanks, Zeo.

@Anders: As of right now, I would place images within the skins folder. So for the “New” skin, I would probably create a ../skins/new/ folder. And geo stuff in the header is just what I put there, no plugin. The comments are powered by the “Live Comment Preview” plugin, available somewhere. Appreciate all the feedback, Anders.

@Trevor: Interesting thought on the location of skins. Hmm. We’ll consider this as we rework how skins work with the Sandbox. Cheers.

@Adam: Also some good ideas about the skins. I had totally forgotten about pre-processing the stylesheets, ala PHP. Don’t think we’ll go that way, just because we need to keep the Sandbox working the same across platforms. Or as similar as possible. And I’d also forgotten about the radio buttons. Considering . . . (Thanks, Adam)

@Ja: As for wording of items here and there, you can always filter it instead of reworking the theme files, though that’s really a personal thing. The .entry-meta has been giving us a lot of trouble recently and we’ve thought about it a lot.

The problem is going with a ul li structure, which is lovely and semantic, is that it is damn hard to style any way other than something resembling a list, and it really increases the learning curve for beginners.

The comment form, though, is getting reworked.

And as far as I understand modules, those work if Widgets work, correct? We are strongly adverse to including any plugin support except for widgets. Sandbox is not K2. It is the opposite of K2. K2 tries to do everything, where as the Sandbox has one explicit purpose.

XOXO also complicates the sidebar code, Widgets integration, and generally the amount of knowledge users will need. These are all good suggestions, Ja, and they may come up again.

@Bjorn: We originally widget-ized the header and footer for the Sandbox, but then removed it. See, and I think this is valid, if I create a skin for the Sandbox, I’ll need to add a create deal of CSS to account for the possibilities of widgets in the header/footer; however, it might be a concession to add a blank footer widget. Still considering. Thanks.

@Albert: This is a alternative to the Sandbox Skins menu that we really like. What you’re suggesting is similar to what is on wp.com. While there are some complications with this (images, base skin/style), it’s something that is still in the running.

Thank you all for taking the time to share your thoughts. It’s appreciated. We’re working on the next major release of the Sandbox right now, and I’ll be posting about it soon.