Hot on the heels of my own sandbox-based theme, Scott and Andy went ahead and dropped Sandbox v0.9 (0.7 only existed long enough for me to grab it out of SVN and build my theme off of it, and 0.8 had too many revisions to be released. 1.0 existed briefly, before being dragged back into beta-ville). The structural changes are much cleaner, so it's easier to tweak the hell out of the thing.
The only new design element is that all of the example layouts now use a navigation menu. This is kind of an outgrowth of the skins menu being deleted: the menu HTML is always there, although it can be hidden in CSS (previously skins could disable the HTML).
And yes, the skins menu is gone. this means theme designers can now rely on the sandbox having a specific CSS. hello template: sandbox. 
Accordingly, my skins have become themes:
The thin line uses about 4 lines of PHP to insert a credit link into the footer. The Joshuaink theme uses that plus the custom header API to help you add your own logo. Both themes are under Creative Commons licenses. Whatever waffling the wordpress developers may do about some themes being necessarily GPL, they can't touch these themes, since they're entirely CSS, save for API compliance (if API compliance transmitted the GPL, binary linux applications would be impossible).
Also, I'm discontinuing development on Sandbox Unsleepable. If I were to convert it to a theme, it would compete directly with the original, which is not my goal. Since the original has been installed on wordpress.com, there's also no reason to develop the custom CSS version either.
9 Comments
Just a quick comment for the moment:
Good choice by making themes with a Sandbox-core instead of Sandbox skins—this is exactly what I hope people will use the Sandbox for. Plus, after this continues to occur and the Sandbox core matures, it’ll become that much harder to best.
These are excellent, Adam.
By the way, really enjoy your narrative of the Sandbox versioning.
rawk.
i made the whole narrative up just so i could say “beta-ville”
He he he.
Let’s hope the days of “…based on Kubrick” are close to over.
I haven’t played around with sandbox much. After reading your blog post I feel I need to look into it. Now I need to hunt for some tutorials
the best place to start is probably the readme. previously i would have said lorelle’s starter list, but that’s based on 0.6.1, which is a bit out of date. scott or i should send her an updated version.
Before Lorelle updates hers, we should wait until v0.9.x is available to wp.com blogs.
But perhaps a selector-full, descriptor-empty
example.cssfile is still in order. I’ll post something later tonight on my blog.Thanks adam …. I will look through it.
I love SANDBOX. I can never find out where to start with it though. But I plan on finding out!
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