If you’ve been watching the Sandbox repository, you may have noticed two branches now existing: v0.9 and v1.0. Let me explain.

Version 1.0 is designed specifically for WordPress 2.3 and utilizes its native support of tagging. That means additional semantic class names for tags. Additionally, there had been a number of functions that had to do a bit more work since they had to work seamlessly with WordPress versions 2.0.x, 2.1.x, and 2.2.x. Those have been simplified to be 2.3-specific. All deprecated tags have been dropped, too.

Version 0.9 is exactly the same as 1.0, except it retains some of those exotic functions and works with pretty much any WordPress version (at least 2.0.x and later). It doesn’t have any incorporated native tagging support. This version will remain around so that 2.0.x legacy users will be able to use the Sandbox as well.

For fun I’ve also added the milestone versions from v0.1 to v0.8 in the repository. These are quite entertaining if you’ve been following the development of the Sandbox for the past 13 months.

Finally, there are some bugs in v1.0. Mostly with tags. As developing for pre-release software is rather difficult, I’ve found.

You thoughts and comments on where the Sandbox stands are welcomed.

Changes from feedback

The most requested revision by far was to do something with those stupid abbr elements 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" title="2006-08-01T00:05:45-0700">August 1, 2008 – 12:05 am</abbr>
</div>

Yes, there were some crude ways to style this abbr in IE 6, 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 parent div element.

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), where N is the number relative to the total count.

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

body.archive div.p1 {
    background: #000;
    border: 5px solid #F00;
    color: #FFF;
}

Then the top-most post (the first, from top to bottom) occuring on a page would be big, black, and have a red border.

Congratulate your first commenter by making the comment gigantic:

body.single li.c1 {
    font-size: 200%;
}

The possibilities are maddening. Thanks to Saracen.

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 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, and archive.php. We’ve given the ones on top an unique id, div#nav-above and the ones below (can you guess?) div#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 the second sidebar 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 the secondary sidebar and get a consistent (for the Sandbox) result. We also added the “« Home” link as a widget, too.

The default contents of primary sidebar 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 the primary sidebar 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.

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?

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, 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 foresee 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 e-mail 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.

Subversion repository

Come and get it, ladies and gentlemen. You can look, but not touch. If you’re interested in following the changes to the Sandbox, you can access Sandbox Subversion repository at Sandbox project home on Google Code. The repository is also available at http://sandbox-theme.googlecode.com/svn/. You’ll need a client.

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

Now, be glad, ye downloaders, since Sandbox v0.6 is out for download before it’s available on WordPress.com blogs. For a short while, there will be some discrepancy between the two. Andy is planning on getting the Sandbox over there updated soon, but, well, he had matters to attend to and I finished my laundry sooner than I thought.

Sadly, I’m not going to go into the changes right now. There’s a post coming in a matter of hours about some of the things that make the Sandbox so great (in my opinion).

Some of you have gotten your wishes. Namely a div around your favorite abbr. And there are some other structural changes—though no massive changes.

Yes, the Subversion repository will go public soon. Not tonight. And probably not tomorrow. Andy’s taking care of that. Tonight or tomorrow I’m going to go in to some detail about the Sandbox. Right now, though, I have clothes to fold.