If you’re a WordPress.com user, have a look at the available themes in your blog dashboard. You’ll notice a new theme available: the Sandbox. I won’t begin my long-winded tale of how this theme came to be what it is, but instead tell you that Andy made it great.
The “Minimalist” has been dropped from the title. (In reverence to actually minimalism perhaps.) The theme is now called just “Sandbox.” Good enough, I say.
Soon the Sandbox will be available for download. I am adding another skin, called Spartan, to the Sandbox core. I hope that the Sandbox will inspire other novices to get their feet wet and make their own theme—or maybe a “skin” as we’re calling these. You’ll only need to know some CSS basics to get started.
While the Sandbox isn’t available for download just quite yet, I promise that you can expect it in the next few dys. If you have any comments about the Sandbox on WordPress.com, you can get in touch with us.
For now, though, check on some of the people using the Sandbox. Look a the source. Visit different pages. Soak it in.
8 Comments
Congrats on getting in on the Wordpress.com list of themes Scott! Good stuff! Great idea with the skin functionality as well!
excellent!
as soon as i saw andy getting involved, i thought this might be where things were headed. congrats, it’s well deserved.
Thanks, all. I’m happy that it’s up on WordPress.com. It’ll be good to get some initial feedback. The Sandbox there will grow a little, too, but I’m really eager to get it ready for download. Soon, though, soon.
Ah, and you can always poke around see who’s using the Sandbox so far.
Wow! I’m so psyched Scott! This is giong to be great. Oddly enough, a while back I was sharing a jotspot space with a couple friends where we listed and brainstormed ideas. Amongst my pile full of notes about things I wanted to do if I ever had the time, I wrote:
Skin My Site! theme to go with theme switcher and let people use Firefox Plugin Stylish and userstyles.org to make and use “skins” for any site that supports the theme/standard
This isn’t exactly the same, but it’s as close as I’ll ever see and I didn’t even have to do anything.
) it could really bring a whole new audience to the mix in addition to the benefits you mentioned.
If this could pick up some of the skinning community it (kickstart it on deviant art
So do you see the creation of a repository of css snippets to use for different elements? I have a feeling this is going to be a lot of fun.
You may want to take a look at Nybble’s plugin, Side Bar Modules which I managed to convince him during development to include an option for per-module css styling (allowing differnt styled modules to be swapped in and out or used on different pages. I don’t know how you’ve scripted Sandbox but I thought you may be interested in seeing if there are any semantic possibilities with that for the future.
Eagerly waiting your release and hope to see you on the 19th!
Ja
I was working on a theme with hAtom support and you delivered something with so much more! Excellent work, and I look forward to trying it on my server.
Whee! I’d heard about Sandbox, of course, being on WP.com, but I hadn’t realised it used hAtom! I’ve been wanting to hAtomise my site for a while now, and I found this information while googling for a hypothetical hAtom plugin. Of course, hAtom has to do with themes, not plugins.
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[...] So but that’s not all… no, Andy Skelton announced (from what I hear) the availability of a new skeleton theme called Sandbox that is designed for themers. If you’re on WordPress.com you can go enable it now, as I have (it’s totally basic, so I imagine that you’ll see a lot of styles start to appear for it) or download it to put on your own blog. [...]
[…] FactoryJoe teases out an announcement at Wordcamp I’d overlooked: So but that’s not all… no, Andy Skelton announced (from what I hear) the availability of a new skeleton theme called Sandbox that is designed for themers. If you’re on WordPress.com you can go enable it now, as I have (it’s totally basic, so I imagine that you’ll see a lot of styles start to appear for it) or download it to put on your own blog.I’ll actually be doing this once I return to San Francisco. […]