Simplish made an appearance on op111.net’s 5-theme shortlist for WordPress. I almost missed the trackback because I was moving the demo blog to make way for this space.

In the end, op111’s demetris chose to apply his own styling to Scott Wallick’s excellent Sandbox theme. I came close to doing the same thing when I went looking for a snazzy ‘default’-kinda theme for Utopian.net’s use - and for my own blog at the Labs. I decided to adopt and update Kenny/Jeffrey’s ScribbishWP, but since I started changing and departing from both ScribbishWP (in code) and Scribbish itself (in style), the plaintxt.org themes like Sandbox and blog.txt have inspired choices for Simplish. We even copy their code: the two basic hCard producer functions used in Simplish 2.0 are derived from blog.txt source (closely enough that Scott’s copyright has joined the NOTICE.)

op111’s list has some references to the many uses folks make of the Sandbox plus some chameleon CSS - Sandbox comes out of the box looking like 1995, but can be made into anything you can tweak into and copy out of Firebug. My favorite is still Sandbox co-creator Andy Skelton’s re-implementation of WordPress’s default/kubrick theme atop Sandbox.

Major overhaul and hCard departures

• Complete hcard/hatom microformatting for posts, authors, even the theme itself.
• Blog.txt/Sandbox-inspired hCard producer functions
• Author’s posts page `extended’ author hCard, with Gravatar
• Improved Archive page (monthly, category, tag, etc) with Archive-level title
• Implemented hAtom hfeed classes around Archives lists as appropriate
• Add single post prev/next post links near footer
• Standardize presentation of prev/next ^(page post), read more, and edit links, respectively, at bottom of content
• Change to simple “Google Style” Subject - Sitename title elements
• Add search term feedback in search results page title and content
• Extensive validation and testing against: WordPress 2.6.1, WordPress 2.7-bleeding, WordPress-µ 2.6 and µ svn HEAD
• Override default gallery shortcode to make output visually identical, but valid XHTML
• New Sitemap template page
• (Minor) code cleanup of Links and Archives page templates
• Sidebar [ol ul] lists styling fixes, and show page hierarchy with indents
• Bare beginnings of gettext internationalization

Get the latest Simplish right here, or see it soon in the WordPress themes directory.

Microformats Macrofix

• Fix hcard/hatom microformatting. Simplish vcard/hatom content now passes through detection/transformation by the Transformr (http://transformr.co.uk)
• Add author url in vcard for each post
• Sidebar ul>li elements now show hierarchy (e.g., sub-pages)

Concentrate on Captions

This is a very-minor release that:

• Styles image captions (generated by WP2.6+) with nicer font and spacing/padding
• Removes unused code in image.php

Bugfix thx 82px

• Removed dangling unused file blogtxt-sampler (my notes - oops)
• Fix typo in image align style causing comments misalignment on posts with image(s)
• Update tags to more clearly describe theme