Stuff of interest to me for WordPress developers
Archive for February, 2009
Sandbox-Soccer Theme
Feb 26th
Over the last two evenings I have created my first real theme. I based on it on Sandbox and called it Sandbox-Soccer. It is a three column theme with two sidebars on the right hand side.
My daughter is playing on a travel soccer team which is going to Sweden later this year and their coach would like to chronicle the team’s activities leading up to and including the trip and he asked me if I could set up a web site for them. I used his requests as a compelling reason to get off my butt and design a theme.
Since I have little design expertise, I found some soccer related vector art on Wikimedia Commons and purchased some from iStockPhoto. It is amazing how much art is available for free (Wikimedia Commons) and for a very reasonable price (iStockPhoto).
With my art in hand, I started working in Illustrator to come up with something I liked. I had found the Watch Football Soccer WordPress theme a while back and I like the look and even downloaded and installed it. However, like a lot of free themes, it has some encrypted PHP code in the footer that does something. I dug through some of it and it adds links to things I don’t want to link to but some of it I couldn’t get decrypted enough to figure out what it did. Regardless, it was enough to concern me about using it so while I like the look, I didn’t like the implementation.
It turns out the artwork used in that theme is available from iStockPhoto. There are also several other variations. I like the silhouettes and found a collection of female soccer silhouettes (important for a girls team) created my own header graphic in a red/yellow/orange color scheme.
At this point it is usable but I will continue to tweak it too. There are some CSS bugs still in it which I need to fix. I also plan to do multiple color variations of it and have both male and female header graphics. I’d like to set up the color and gender choices on a theme options page.
The demo is running on my Theme Demo page. I will make a download available soon.
Theme Collection
Feb 24th
In my quest for theme ideas, I ran across this interesting post. It is a collection of ~140 WordPress themes. The thing I like in particular about this article is the way the themes are presented. The images are large enough that you can actually see the design without having to navigate away from the article itself. I wish more theme sites did this. It would make browsing themes much easier.
Theme Frameworks
Feb 6th
I want to use a theme framework to develop a couple themes. Why do I want to do this? Because I don’t want to reinvent the wheel. There are several to choose from or I could write my own. I really don’t want to write my own.
Frameworks
I am sure there are more but these are the ones I have looked at. I had pretty much settled on Sandbox as I found it easy to work with and there was some discussion a while ago about including it as part of WordPress. I was a bit concerned that it hadn’t been updated since last summer but thought "hey, maybe it is done”. So I started playing around with it for my LEGO Blog. What is there now is very much a work in progress. I got it working enough that I could see where I was going.
Then I saw this: http://www.plaintxt.org/2009/01/looking-for-a-wordpress-brand/
Uh-oh. What is the future of Sandbox? I posed a question on the Wp-Hackers mailing list but the thread went wildly off track and it was never answered. The comments on the announcement indicate that it might end up as part of WordPress but other than that, I haven’t seen any other mention of it anywhere.
I am reluctant to invest more time in a Sandbox based theme until I know where it is headed. I guess I’ll go back and look at the others again. I really like the idea of child themes so I want to explore this some more before giving up.