I’ve recently discovered the wonderfully marked-up “Sandbox”:http://plaintxt.org/themes/sandbox theme for WordPress and, in so doing, discovered the inspiration to build another theme for myself. But I also discovered rather quickly that there were a few minor problems with things not spreading out to the furthest edges of the browser. So I sought help and found that I needed to reset the margins for the html and body tags. I was also directed to this fabulous CSS entry called “Reset Reloaded”:http://meyerweb.com/eric/thoughts/2007/05/01/reset-reloaded/, which provides global resets for just about everything in a basic web page. I applied these and discovered the beauty of a WordPress theme with absolutely no formatting whatsoever. It’s a wonderful thing.
From there I’ve begun restructuring every element to my satisfaction, building what I need and want. And with Sandbox, this is made all the easier because everything has an id or a class (or multiple classes). All I have to do is look at the page source and see what tags are generated by the built-in code and then build the stylesheet accordingly. I’m working on a single-column, minimalistic theme with very few (if any) frills or flourishes. At this point, I’m thinking that most of the traditional sidebar content will also be shifted to a custom-built page template, but that one I’m going to have to work on a bit and see what comes of it. It’s a work in progress, and I’ll likely finish it up sometime later this week, due to the fact that there will be a brief pause in all coding work while I read the final installment of Harry Potter tomorrow.
If you’re a web coder, do check out Eric Meyer’s “Reset Reloaded.” I think you’ll like what you see and how much it cleans things up for you from the outset.
