Shades of Gray for Wordpress Sandbox
Published on August 5, 2007 in WordPressShades of Gray is not a theme for Wordpress itself, but a skin for the Wordpress Sandbox theme. Shades of Gray is a minimalist, two column fluid-width theme. It is primarily a grayscale skin but could easily be modified to use whatever colors you desired. If you would like to play around with the skin in the wild feel free to download it and give it a try.
Installing Shades of Gray is simple. Just follow the steps below.
1. Upload the sandbox-shadesofgray folder to your Sandbox folder in the wp-content/themes/ on your server.
2. Edit the default Sandbox style.css file, so that it loads the Shades of Gray skin. You can do this by replacing current @import url… line with this one:
@import url(’sandbox-Shades of Gray/style.css’);
Download the skin from the Sandbox Design page.
Note that you must have Sandbox installed to use Shades of Gray, if you don’t have Sandbox you can get it here.
Modifying Shades of Gray
Feel free to modify Shades of Gray in any way you like. To make the skin your own you should replace the icon in the top left corner of the screen and the panoramic image spreading across the top of the page with images of your own. In addition, the Shades of Gray skin includes numerous print styles to format the page for printing and is also designed to format a Wordpress category named ‘Asides’ differently than other categories. Either one of these can be changed or removed entirely. More details on how to to this is in the readme file in the download.
License & Credits
Shades of Gray is released under the GNU General Public License, meaning you can do pretty much whatever you want with it, but a link back to lesliefranke.com is always appreciated. Of special note some of the icons in Shades of Gray have been adapted from the “Mini” (http://www.famfamfam.com/lab/icons/mini/) icon collection by Mark James and the Feed Icons are from http://www.feedicons.com/.
Shades of Gray is awesome Leslie! It really fits what I like in web design. I think you will fair well in the SDC. Good luck to you
Will,
Thanks for the kind words.
Congratulations, Leslie. Shades of Gray is a great theme.
Will you continue to improve, update and support the Shades-Of-Gray theme ?
Wow.
Really great skin. I was looking for some NE Oh blogs and came across this. Really amazing work.
Very cool theme Leslie. I am really happy to say that I used it on my blog. Thanks for your work!
Leslie
love the design
just left a post at sandbox asking about your plans (i hope) to introduce a 3 column version (bog text in the middle)
much appreciated
cheers
Hey leslie! Just wanted to say I love the theme.. great, elegant, clean basis. I’m modifying it (heavily) for a site I’m working on currently (www.radioslipstream.com/wp). I’m currently confused though as to why it is centered in IE and right on the left in Firefox? is this just default behaviour of the browsers? I’d like to force it to the left.
Hi Leslie, I love your theme Shades of Grey. Thanks so much for designing it.
I am having a problem and don’t know where it comes from. My blog doesn’t show in firefox. I upgraded ff and got their plugins at the same time that I upgraded to wp2.3
So is the theme compatible with 2.3? or maybe it’s the plugins that are interfering.
The firebug shows as follows:
87 dropdown.onchange = onCatChange;
Myhost says that my data base is aomehow not complete and I might have to download wp again.
Any ideas?
Thanks
Luz
(post_id, category_id) VALUES (1748, 3)
WordPress database error:
Luz,
The skin if for the latest version of Sandbox which works with WordPress 2.3. My guess is that you have some plugin that is interfering (maybe a category widget???). Try disabling all of your plugins and enabling one by one to see if you can trap the error.
love the design
I’ve been using Shades of Gray for a while now, and I love it. One question though.
For the first time, I have a static page that is a child of another page. The link does not show in the tabs across the top of the page. Is there some way to get the page hierarchy to display?
Thanks again for a very cool and clean design.
Jeremy,
The page hierarchy can display in one of two manners: as the child pages being a drop down menu under each parent page or as the child pages just being another page in the horizontal menu. Let me know which way you would like and I can post the CSS code you will need to make the change.
Yes very good desing. Congrats.
Thank you very much, Leslie, I was just about to launch my blog with a heavily modified shades-of-gray when they released wordpress 2.5. Now I’m unsure what to do; launch first or upgrade first..? Do you have any idea if your shades-of-gray will work with the new wordpress? And/or with the new sandbox version?
I’m really confused and unsure now. And sad, since I wanted to launch my (private) blog (only for friends & family) with an April fools joke.
Would appreciate any help you could give.
I love the Shades of Gray design. I’ll have to use it for my new blog I’m starting. Thanks for the info on how to edit it.
This is the first theme to woo me away from Scott Wallick’s Plaintxtblog theme that I’ve been using for two years, mainly because of your crisp layout and typography, as well as the header image.
What I’d really like to do is to put some random rotating images in the header. I’ve found the call on line 179 of the css
background: url(images/mast.jpg) no-repeat;but I’m not well educated enough to make a group of images to display in turn.I’ve tried MHough’s Random Image Rotator, (http://mhough.com/wordpress/2008/header-image-rotator-plugin/) and despite correctly filling out the configuration setup, the result was just a blank space where the header image should appear. I know that what I’m trying to do is beyond the bounds of the Shades of Gray theme, but if you have any advice that’s better than my replacing the “mast.jpg” manually every day, I’d be delighted to hear it!
Peace,
Michael
A bit more digging around revealed this page:
http://weblogtoolscollection.com/archives/2004/04/17/random-image-header/#comment-1233958, and I now have random images in my header. I think it’s traditional to say the word “Woot” at this point.Added to my download list.
Really great skin. I was looking for some NE Oh blogs and came across this. Really amazing work.
Hey,
I am, Michael
verry cool site
check out my site:
http://5twhrxI2cK.spaces.live.com/
What about tag pages? I’m finding that alot of my traffic is coming from tag pages. I didn’t see any settings for true/false with regard to tag pages. Thx.
It’s a great design. I like it.
Hi again Leslie,
I’m wondering whether Shades of Gray is happy with the changes to comments in WordPress 2.7. I’d be happy to know your views.
This sandbox skin is the best I’ve ever used….
I love the shades of grey theme, I think I will be using this for my blog. Thank you.
Michael…I have downloaded the beta of WordPress 2.7 and will test it. Since it is just a skin of the Sandbox theme it should work fine.
I would like to say clearly that if I wanted a true CMS is that it does not have post and page versioning. Now, to my knowledge, neither Drupal or Joomla feature this either, but some of new CMSs do. If someone wanted to create the ultimate WP CMS plugin, they should develop one that uses an extra table in the database to maintain old versions of posts and pages.
The page hierarchy can display in one of two manners: as the child pages being a drop down menu under each parent page or as the child pages just being another page in the horizontal menu. Let me know which way you would like and I can post the CSS code you will need to make the change.
Lovely! I think i will install it to my soviet photo site. Thank you !
thanks very nice plugin
The theme shades are great
I just wanted to say how grateful I am for this Sandbox skin. Aside from one or two minor hitches (neither of which are due to your design!) it integrates beautifully with an Indexhibit site I’m putting together. Many thanks, and well done.
Excellent Post, thanx for sharing the same.. Will keep on reading the post
Stumbled
your post .. cheers