One of the most interesting themes for WordPress is the Sandbox theme. Sandbox is different than most WordPress themes due to its semantic markup and dynamic class-generating functions. The authors of the theme have leveraged Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) to allow for the styling of almost anything on the page without having to touch any PHP code. Nearly every HTML element has an assigned class. For example, multiple classes are assigned to the body and to every post. This allows designers to change the look and feel of Sandbox by creating different skins (CSS files) which are then applied to the theme.

One of the main issues with the Sandbox theme so far has been a lack of quality skins. This should begin to change with the close of the recent Sandbox Design Competition. I’ve been watching the Design Competition as it has unfolded, even creating a skin myself, and have been looking forward to see the skins that have been created.

From what I see so far I am most impressed with the following three themes:

Diurnal – Diurnal is a three-column layout that changes styles according to the time of day.

Moo-Point – Moo-Point is a two-column layout with a header navigation and right-hand sidebar. The theme is nicely laid out with appropriate white space making it easy to read.

Oranges- Oranges is a two-column layout and minimalistic skin with a dash of orange.

For a look at all of the skins from the Sandbox Designs Competition head over to the Sandbox Designs site and see live previews of each skin here.

This entry was posted on Sunday, August 5th, 2007 at 7:53 pm and is filed under WordPress. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.