Now that there are a substantial number of drop-in sandbox skins for differing verions of the Sandbox, I'm working on a catalog of all the designs, so that wordpress.com users and other sandboxers can find designs easily.  There have been several requests in the wordpress.com forums for a list like this, and the Sandbox Wiki seems as good a place for it as any.

This skin is for WordPress.com Users. feel free to use this skin ‘as is’. the images are hosted on wordpress.com, so it’s no different than hosting them yourself. If you host your own blog, please get the zipped version of the skin.

Credits

A List Apart's article on typesetting (followed to the letter because IE sucks)
Joen Asmussen's brilliant idea about adding columns without touching the markup
Dezinerfolio's web2.0 layer styles
KDE's Oxygen icons project
Datestamps inspired by the cover of Eero Saarinen, designed by CoDe Communication and Design

Description

Designed for the Sandbox Designs Competition, this CSS design is an experiment in layout. There are two sidebars stacked vertically. The second sidebar stacks horizonally, visually making 2 sidebars out of 1.

License

This program is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation; version 2 of the License.

Installation

Select the Sandbox-10 theme (currently on page 4).  Then open the download link below, and copy the contents into the Edit CSS box, Making sure to check the "Start from scratch and just use this" box.  If you'd like to customize the graphics, be sure to check out the Photoshop files, which you can abuse to your heart's content.

Download

Walk in the Shadows CSS

Andy has finally gotten the Sandbox updated on WordPress.com.  Both of my designs for the competition were too tightly focused on version 1.01, so I've been eagerly awaiting the upgrade.

This skin is for WordPress.com Users. feel free to use this skin ‘as is’. the images are hosted on wordpress.com, so it’s no different than hosting them yourself. If you host your own blog, please get the zipped version of the skin.

Credits

Some abuse of a stock photo by Ryan Ford.
Based on "for elaine", which became archGFX v02.

License

This program is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation; version 2 of the License.

This design is dual-licensed as Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.5 License. Where possible, please include a link to this page for attribution.

Installation

Select the Sandbox-10 theme (currently on page 4).  Then open the download link below, and copy the contents into the Edit CSS box, Making sure to check the "Start from scratch and just use this" box.

Download

Promised Land CSS

1. abuse of #access as a wrapper for #menu, etc.

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:

• Bus Full of hippies: Sandbox Edition
• The Thin Line

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.

The Late Show by Liz Lubowitz.

As much as i love using this theme, It's taking away from the energy i need to direct towards other projects. Inspired by patrick heaney, i'm going to strip down to something spartan, until i have the time to finish my own design.

This is a Work In Progress. First there's the matter of license. Liz happily granted me permission to port the theme, but the theme is certainly not GPL, so it's always going to be kind of "for personal use only".

Also, Sixapart's Style Contest themes work a little differently, in that they make use of a body class for each layout. (two-column-left, etc.) Even after adding the name of the current sandbox skin as a class to the body of the sandbox, i'd still need to finish my "Layout Dependent Sandbox Skins" plugin for this to really be workable.

Download:

So here's my two column left version of the theme, and hopefully Rothyschild will finish her 3 column version soon. Select the 'no stylesheet' skin, and paste these two CSS files into the 'edit css' box in order:
base-weblog.css
thelateshow.css

Both K2 and Fauna were designed to have skins applied to them. K2 has a directory of about a dozen skins, all of which can be applied pretty easily. my personal favorite is fork, by dave kellam. he's the guy who wrote the flickrrss widget, which i'm also trying to emulate with the godforsaken table-based widget we have here on wp.com.

Fork.css

It's actually based on the update by Gigi. It's not like porting a theme to a sandbox skin, where you have to rename the selectors, and deal with quirks. i just uploaded the images, and did a find and replace for fork/ with http://sunburntkamel.wordpress.com/files/2007/01/. (the flickr widget was another matter, but i've submitted feedback for that). I'm still messing around with it, but it works as is, so go get dirty!