Sandbox Designs Competition

The Sandbox is truly unique. It is a theme that aims to be anything and to be the best at being anything. It degrades beautifully. It embraces the best available practices in blog design.

So actually the Sandbox is a lot of things:

• Very beautiful on the inside
• For WordPress 2.0.x through 2.2.x
• Valid XHTML 1.0 Transitional
• Widgets plugin-friendly
• The basis for innumerable designs, themes

More importantly, the Sandbox can be a lot of things. The real feature of the Sandbox is its markup. The use of class-generating functions in key elements (the body, post div, and comment li elements) creates the most extensible WordPress theme available.

And as Andy said, Given straightforward markup with plenty of selectors, there isn’t much that can’t be accomplished with CSS and a decent browser.

Dynamic, semantic class selectors

For those unfamiliar with the Sandbox, a quick introduction to its semantic class-generating functions will clarify why the Sandbox is so powerful—and so exceptionally fun to design for both novice and experienced designers.

The Sandbox generates semantic classes for the body, each post div, and each comment li element, meaning the class names literally describe the content and are not designer-coder mumbo-jumbo.

Classes are produced that reflect the post author, (eg, class="author-admin…"), categories (eg, class="category-breaking-news…"), the date when published (eg, class="h09 d17 m05 y2007…"), and many, many more. Using these classes as selectors in style sheets means that you can design a theme that is based on both structure and content.

You could use the CSS selector div.category-asides to do everything an asides plugin does, but without a plugin or editing the CSS files. You could use date selectors to style your whole blog for a special day or month. You could use entirely different layouts depending on whether a page, single post, index, etc., is being display.

The base amount of unique class combinations is around 24,000 (not including date-based classes). You would not, of course, use that many selectors, but there are more than enough to design this in ways that would usually be limited to plugins.

For more information on the three different class-generating functions and for tables showing the semantic class name structures, download the Sandbox and view the Sandbox readme.html.

Old and new standards

For the most part, the WordPress community is quite friendly towards Web standards, such as W3C validation. The Sandbox is valid XHTML, but it also embraces newer tools that make content more accessible, like the hAtom and hCard microformats. Microformats are markup that help express and share blog content.

WordPress has one microformat built-in to its core: XFN, which provides information as to the relationships of linkees to linkers (if that makes sense). There are numerous tools for users to take advantage of various Microformats, including many WordPress plugins.

Most notably, the blog superpower Technorati is incorporating Microformats in to its search, which should interest every blogger.

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