New Wordpress Theme

In my last post, I mentioned that I was worried about having to dig too deep into the mess of PHP/HTML that is WordPress templates in order to come up with a decent theme for my new resurrected blog. Whenever I look at other people’s code, I tend to find about a million things I hate, and I start ripping things out until I end up rewriting everything from scratch. I guess I’m just a perfectionist, and I very rarely come across developers who strive for the same level of beauty and elegance in their code as I do (which is why I could never be a full-time developer in the corporate world).

Anyway, I came across this Sandbox theme last night, which bills itself as a “theme for themers.” The cool thing about it is that you don’t have to touch the PHP template files at all. After installing it like any other theme, you just create a new blank theme directory and drop your own style.css file in it. Then you tell WordPress that your theme (consisting of a single style.css file) should use the Sandbox theme as a template:

                      /*
                      THEME NAME: Conigliaro
                      THEME URI: http://conigliaro.org/
                      DESCRIPTION: A very stupid theme
                      VERSION: 0.1
                      AUTHOR: Mike
                      AUTHOR URI: http://conigliaro.org/
                      TEMPLATE: sandbox
                      */
                      

Essentially, you’re overriding the style.css file from Sandbox with your own. Pretty awesome.