Color schemes were pretty straight forward.  I wanted to base them on the Fibblesnork Backgrounds which I like a lot.  The Fibblesnork backgrounds are very small images designed to tile across a web page.  In my case, I wanted to use them to frame the content area.  There are 18 different colors and two sizes for a total of 36 different background color choices.  At some point I plan to support all 18 colors but initially I am only offering three:  Red, Green, and Blue.  Setting up a theme options page to select a color scheme was pretty straight forward, I had done that previously with my Soccer Theme.

WordPress has some built in functionality to do custom header images but it didn’t really do what I wanted.  I wanted to allow a fair amount of control over the look and layout of the header.  I decided to support three header images:  Left, center, and right.  I didn’t want to manage the header images so I decided to leverage the built in media management capability.

The theme options page will present any image that is in the media library as a potential header image.  But how?  I wanted to make it fairly simple to use.  I decided to implement a drag and drop scheme based on the jQuery UI and discussed it in detail in a prior post.  It took a little while to work it all out as I had done very little with jQuery previously.

The last thing I wanted to allow was the ability to tweak the header layout with CSS.  For this I added what I referred to as “CSS Overrides” for the blog title, blog tagline, and the three header images.  The combination of color schemes, custom header images, and CSS Overrides allows the Sandbox LEGO theme to take on a fairly distinct look.

The theme is currently in use on three blogs, I expect to make it available for download in the next few days.  There are a couple issues I know of that need some styling help and I want to get two more color schemes finished before I release it.  Color schemes aren’t too bad – I just need to pick the proper values.  I have a script that actually generates the CSS files.

There hadn’t been any posts on plaintxt.org or sndbx.org in a long time.  There was a small amount of traffic in the Sandbox Forum but nothing substantial.  I really like the simplicity of the Sandbox theme and gone ahead and used it on a couple projects even though it hadn’t been updated in a while.  I figured with new ownership, it was bound to start again at some point.

Maybe I was wrong?  I don’t know.  I have been thinking of revisiting my Soccer theme since after using it for the CASL Ambassadors over the summer, I found a few minor issues with it.  As I thought about updating it I kept thinking I should switch to a framework actively being worked (e.g. the Carrington theme?).  So I went back and took a look at the PlainTxt blog and what do you know?  A post!  A minor security update was added to the Sandbox theme back in July.  Was development active again?  Poking around it appears that no, not really.  Scott Wallick had made the change not the new owner who ever that is.  Other than a couple comments asking the same questions I was pondering (has development started again?)( there wasn’t anything else.  Bummer.

Now what to do?  Continue?  Fork?  Pack up and move on?   Decisions, decisions …