What began as a couple patches for a minor 2.0.1 bump grew into more extensive 2.1 improvements:

• Trackback URI and Comments: combine display into a single element.
• Don’t display Category in post meta box for Uncategorized posts.
• Fix empty li element by displaying nothing on posts without tags. (Thanks Tim Hamilton.)
• Display dates on posts and comments now honor date format settings in wp-admin -> Settings -> General. (Thanks demetris from op111.net.)
• Remove header_shadow.gif. Alignment changes by a few pixels; the blog title underline is now a CSS border, not an image.
• Fix bug in sp_vallery() gallery shortcode override to handle links and HTML in gallery image captions.
• Fix bug in sp_vallery() that created extra empty gallery div. (See this issue in upstream Sandbox code.)
• Standardize and simplify use of text symbols:
  • [ ] (logged-in user UI elements)
  • | (element separation)
  • - (title element separation)
  • « » (chronological traversal)
• Adopt rel=home in header and footer links to blog’s home page.
• Replace all remaining comments_popup_link() calls with comments_link()/comments_number().
• Don’t show post counts in default sidebar’s Archives and Categories lists.
• A little more prep for gettext internationalization.
• CSS cleanups and simplifications for some double-definitions. (Thanks threesomehour.com.)
• PHP code cleanups.
• (Continued) Re-verification of posts and page templates for hAtom/hCard and XHMTL/CSS validity.

Download 2.1 right here, or see it soon in the WordPress themes directory.

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.