How to Easily Add or Change Sandbox Design
Posted by Snap! on August 20th, 2007
There are many new designs that came out of the Sandbox design competition and each design comes with instructions on how to install them. Not following my gut, I decided to instead follow the included instructions and I find out that it never worked for me. So I decided to write my own instructions for those who are planning on using the Sandbox based designs without having to deal with the hassles I faced. BTW, if you have not noticed it already, we started featuring Sandbox competition designs and hope to have more for you soon.
What the instructions say?
It is critical to read this to understand the base structure and why it probably never worked for me.
If you plan on using a Sandbox design, you’ll need the Sandbox theme in the following folder with a file structure like:
/wp-content/themes/sandbox/style.css
This makes sense, Sandbox is a complete theme and when activated works as is.
The instruction also recommends the design file structure is set as below:
/wp-content/themes/some-design-name/style.css
(where some-design-name is the name of the design)
This is the part that does not work for me, mostly all designs are just that: a CSS file and some images, they do not have any template files like index.php and in almost every case result in a “Template is Missing” error when you go to Admin >> Presentation >> Theme.
Irrespective of the WP version you use, or even using the /wp-includes/themes.php patch for Sandbox results in this error, in short, using the instructions included with the design just does not work (again it’s a personal experience, I might be screwing up some place).
So what did I do?
Instead of including the design folder under the main ‘themes’ folder, I placed it within the Sandbox theme folder like below:
/wp-content/themes/sandbox/some-design-name/style.css
I then opened the Sandbox themes stylesheet (/wp-content/themes/sandbox/style.css) and deleted all the styles below the comment /* Just some example content */
I then replaced the style import URL from
@import url(’sandbox-layouts/2c-l.css’);
to
@import url(’ some-design-name/style.css’);
That does it, simple aye.
Tagged: Best WordPress Themes, Blogging Tips, Copyrights and Licenses, Design Tools, Keyboard Shortcuts, PimpDaBlog, RSS Feeds, Resources, Sandbox Theme, Selection, Thumbnail viewer plugin, Tips, Web Tools, WordPress, wpsnap
3 Responses to “How to Easily Add or Change Sandbox Design”
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August 20th, 2007 at 12:51 pm
i should really write this up myself, but you might also want to delve into template: sandbox, for building purely CSS themes (the less people redistribute PHP they don’t understand, the better, IMHO)
August 21st, 2007 at 12:38 pm
I kinda sorta touched the surface of what Adam mentioned in the Sandbox Forums.
But this is a sound approach too—so thanks!
August 21st, 2007 at 3:37 pm
@ Scott/Adam
I did notice the ‘template’ part in the css and I am using the patch. However, “TEMPLATE: sandbox” would not work with “THEME NAME: Sandbox” with an uppercase “S” and almost all designs I downloaded from the competition site have “sandbox” for template and Sandbox version 0.94 uses the theme name “Sandbox”.
Alternatively, I could have gone and changed the Sandbox theme name to “sandbox” but never bothered at that time