Sandbox Unsleepable

This Sandbox Skin is for self hosted Wordpress installations. If you are using the Custom CSS upgrade on wordpress.com, get just the CSS.

Unsleepable Screenshot

CREDITS

This is a port of Ben Gray's Unsleepable to Sandbox. It's mainly a proof of concept, although Sandbox does provide some useful features. Theme Author: Ben Gray This theme has been slightly modified from the base theme, K2 by Michael Heilemann Header code base gleaned from Foogaming.com All elements of this theme are protected by the GPL. Unsleepable uses Fam Fam Fam Silk Icons IMPORTANT: This is a proof-of concept release. The classes and ID's of sandbox are not final, so i may need to update this.

PREPARATION

Number of entries: Unsleepable was designed to show only 2 entries on the front page, with the remaining entries showing as links directly below, in the bottom block. (It still works just fine with more entries.) Date Formating: Again, this is optional. Unsleepable looks best with the following date and time settings:

Date Formatting

Skin: This is designed for use with Sandbox. It does not work as a standalone theme. Header Image: Unsleepable uses a clickable header image. you'll need to create one, otherwise your blog will say 'unsleepable' at the top. There are tutorials for GIMP or Photoshop to create a header image. GIMP is free and open-source, Photoshop is $600-ish. your call. After creating the image, you'll need to save it as 'title.gif' and upload it to wp-content/themes/sandbox/skins/unsleepable.

DIFFERENCES

Sandbox is not Unsleepable. I've done my best to make the differences as minimal as possible. here they are:

  • Tabs are not all the same width. they depend on the length of the name of the page you create. (casualty of needing to re-write the header)
  • The footer doesn't span the entire page. If I find a way to change this, I will. I'm not sure it's possible, though.
  • The edit link is at the bottom of the post. This is one of the many structural differences between unsleepable and sandbox. But hey, at least you get the cool Silk pencil icon. :P

FEATURES

Aside from the afformentioned clickable header image, you'll notice that unsleepable uses a widgetized bottom block. The secondary sidebar (the bottom block) only shows up on the front page of your blog. If you add more than three widgets, they will wrap to a second line., and cause a very large bottom block. If that's what you like, go nuts. You may want to make sure that the third widget (farthest right) is taller than the rest so that the wrapping looks nice. Noteworthy Posts: If you create a category called 'Noteworthy', you'll notice that any posts in that category will have a star next to the title. You can show a list of Noteworthy posts by adding an RSS widget to the sidebar, and adding the feed for that category (see the RSS link on your archives page). Page Navigation: When you create new pages, they will show up as tabs in the top menu. Unless, of course, you use give them a Page Parent while you're writing. Then they will only show up in the Pages widget. The pages widget, in turn, will only show up when you're viewing a page. if that doesn't suit you, feel free to remove this section:

body.home .widget_pages, body.archive .widget_pages, body.single .widget_pages { display: none; }

Then the pages widget will show up on all pages. Either way, I'd recommend putting the pages widget near the top of the primary sidebar. Archives and Links: This skin includes fully styling for the archives and links pages built into Sandbox. They're based on Ben's original design for the Extended Live Archives Page.

DOWNLOAD

Sandbox Unsleepable 0.6.1.zip

INSTALLATION

extract the zip file, and place unsleepable.css, unsleepable.png, and the unsleepable folder into /wp-content/themes/sandbox/skins.

11 Comments

  1. Posted 14 Aug 2006 at 11:44 |
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    Hi,
    The download link appears Dead.

  2. Posted 14 Aug 2006 at 11:51 |
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    der, sorry about that.
    apparently the rich text editor doesn’t like me.

    fixed now!

  3. Posted 14 Aug 2006 at 3:11 |
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    Thank you for the prompt response. I can’t wait to test your theme out now, it seems very good so far.

  4. Posted 15 Aug 2006 at 2:45 |
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    adam… was it difficult making a skin for sandbox? i’ve been thinking of porting one of my themes or creating a new one just for it.

  5. Posted 15 Aug 2006 at 6:53 |
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    unsleepable was a little more difficult than i think most would be. but then, that’s part of why i chose it. i don’t think i’ll be creating anything new until a) i find out what’s going on with thomas’ competition b) they go a release cycle without changing selectors. the changes they’ve made are good, i just don’t want to have to keep redoing things.

    wank said hers only took like ten minutes for renaming the selectors, and then a bit of bugfixing.

  6. avatar
    snoogly
    Posted 15 Aug 2006 at 7:36 |
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    Sorry if this is a daft question, but what would the advantages be in going for Sandbox + your skin, rather than just going for the original Unsleepable?

    Please don’t get me wrong - I am just trying to get this clear in my mind. K2 confuese me - and so does Sandbox, a little.

    :-)

  7. Posted 15 Aug 2006 at 8:49 |
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    it’s not daft. i was going to devote an entire post to explaining just that.

    1. sandbox doesn’t use any javascript on it’s own. nor does it use gravatars. this makes it load _a lot_ faster. original unsleepable actually doesn’t even use much of the massive amount of code in k2
    2. original unsleepable only uses widgets for the sidebar. this uses widgets for the bottom block as well.
    3. hAtom: chris messina explains that one the best.
    4. Proof of concept: this is more to show what’s possible with Sandbox than anything else.
  8. Posted 16 Aug 2006 at 2:11 |
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    hmm… are you used to making your CSS structure from ground up? I guess then it would be expected to be a little bit more difficult if that’s the case. anyway, i think i’ll give it a try myself over the weekend. i don’t know, maybe i just wanted to jump on the bandwagon :D

  9. Posted 16 Aug 2006 at 2:26 |
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    i usually build from the ground up, yes. that’s not what i did for unsleepable, though. unsleepable was a case of matching selector names.

    and then building the bottomblock from scratch, and borrowing the menu from this blog.

  10. avatar
    mike
    Posted 28 Aug 2006 at 9:45 |
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    Hello, I’m a newbie when it comes Wordpress. I really like this skin, really nice work :)

    I notice that you have a ‘photos’ section in the example screenshot. Is this a photos plugin for WordPress? if so I would be very grateful if you let me know where to get it, as i would love to implement the same on my wordpress blog.

    thanks again for a great skin.

    Mike

  11. Posted 28 Aug 2006 at 9:51 |
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    The ‘Photos’ Section is delivered by FlickrRSS. version 3.0.3 is a widget, so it’s pretty easy to use. (same way i put flickr photos on the front page of this blog)

5 Trackbacks/Pingbacks

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