Special thanks to Kjell Knudsen for providing the Norwegian translation and the sandbox.pot file. Nokao has been kind enough to provide the Italian translation.

Subversion users can get the latest version from the Sandbox repository:

svn checkout http://sandbox-theme.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/

Kjell was kind enough to provide an outline on how to help translate on the Sandbox project home, Sandbox in Your Language. When you have your .mo and .po files ready to submit, just open a ticket on the Sandbox project home and I’ll email you for the files.

And I’m excited to be opening up the Sandbox to a wider audience—the non-English speaking world. A much wider audience.

In the themes mentioned above, the following improvements have been made:

• Better accessibility

  • Just like the Sandbox, actually; check out the source for the specifics

• Cross-browser consistency

  • I checked screenshots for many browsers, browsershots.org

• Better Widgets support

  • Now each theme loads its own widgets, so the default sidebar content can be recreated entirely with widgets

• Dropped the theme toolkit

  • Just chose to write my own theme options menus

• hAtom support

  • Implemented the hAtom 0.1 schema, which is a good thing

• hCard support

  • Now post and comment authors get hCards

• New version notification

  • When a newer version is available, a notice will appear

• Option for comments on pages

  • Again, re: Sandbox; see included readme.html for details

• Print styles

  • Simple, but effective; could easily be enhanced with a little work

• Standardized special classes

  • These special classes will work across all my themes

• XHTML Transitional DTDs

  • Dropped the Strict DTD to make themes more resilient and hardier

Working on revising all of these themes taught me a whole lot. First, the thank-you roll call for those who helped me (in no particular order at all):

• For the new version notification script, thanks goes to ceejay.
• For helping make the Sandbox and teaching me heaps, thanks to Andy.
• For being a good fellow-WordPresser peer, thanks to Adam.
• For always being around to test, a great thanks to Rick.
• For the image generating PHP script in Barthelme, thanks again to Andy.
• Thanks for the file icons go to Mark.
• Thanks for the feed icon go to Matt.

But there are a few things I wanted to mention specifically for each theme. Try downloading the themes and giving them a spin if what I mention here doesn’t make sense. Now the specifics:

• Barthelme

  • Custom header option, much like Kubrick (see thanks above)
  • Option for enabling an author byline (for multiple vs. single author blogs)

• blog.txt

  • Nine different layouts possible: two 2-column and one 3-column each with three alignment options
  • Option for enabling an author byline (for multiple vs. single author blogs)

• plaintxtBlog

  • All the layout issues with IE 6 in the previous version are fixed
  • Improved markup (and still the minimal of minimal themes)

• Simplr

  • Improved banner navigation links with “Skip to . . .” links
  • Now features its own Simplr Recent Comments widget

• veryplaintxt

  • Banner navigation links appear when sidebar doesn’t
  • A great update, which aims only to improve the same old, same old

Now I await your input.