Recently, I used Sandbox to build the Wrath theme.
The first time toying with the Sandbox theme was a challenging, but rewarding experience. From dynamic classes and backward compatibility techniques to negative margins and avoiding bloated markup, I’ve learned a lot.
You might not know this; my skills are self-taught. And, I haven’t had time to keep up with the latest techniques and standards so I’m grateful for it when something like Sandbox comes along. For me, it reinforced fundamentals, introduced new techniques (WordPress related), forced me to push CSS possibilities, and allowed me to end up with something up to standards. All of that within one sitting, as you can imagine, I can’t say enough about the Sandbox theme.
Conversely, although now I can see why other theme authors have been pushing for widespread adoption of Sandbox, there’s room for improvement (like all things of course).
For one thing, Sandbox’s horizontal menu does not limit
wp_list_pages()
depth display to 1. If you don’t know what I’m talking about. Imagine a horizontal menu coded for one level of links having to display two or three levels. The Sandbox default stylesheet tries to work around the multiple depths display by telling the next level of links to display as drop-down links (only visible on hover).
Sandbox drop-down links are slick, but they can’t solve this problem because the drop-down solution doesn’t work out of the box, not even in Firefox. The problem isn’t whether the default styles for drop-down links matches those of the customized theme or skin. The problem is the drop-down links don’t function or display properly. Some of the drop down links are displayed in Firefox, partially. For Internet Explorer 6, they don’t appear at all.
The temporary solution is to add
depth=1
to
wp_list_pages()
, in the
functions.php
file.
For another example, the reason Wrath is only a theme based on Sandbox rather than a Sandbox skin is because there was no way for me to add the red about box without touching the source codes. This isn’t actually a problem, but it would help future Sandbox skin designers a lot if later versions allow us to add on or modify the source code without having to touch it.
Rather than despite the small room for improvements, Sandbox is a great theme because it has almost everything you need to learn and build upon.
Of course, I will continue working with Sandbox. A Sandbox checklist will be posted soon.