[wp-hackers] Looking for guidance on building on top of another theme

[Mike Little]

On Thu, Feb 23, 2012 at 14:01, Mike Walsh <mpwalsh8 at gmail.com> wrote:

> On Wed, Feb 22, 2012 at 5:57 PM, Chip Bennett <chip at chipbennett.net>
> wrote:
>
> > Why not patch Sandbox, and then contribute the fixes back up-stream to
> > Sandbox?
> >
> >
> This would be my preferred approach as I've done this with some other
> plugins.  In this case, I've tried to contact the owner of the Google Code
> repository (Scott Walick) and never gotten a response.  For all practical
> purposes, Sandbox appears to have been abandoned, at least that is what it
> looks like to me.
>
>
The sandbox theme (and it's brethren) were officially abandoned at least a
couple of years ago ( http://www.plaintxt.org/ ).



> That said, it does appear that the WordPress.com theme repository has a
> newer version of Sandbox (1.6.2) that the version I have been using from
> Google Code.
>
> https://wpcom-themes.svn.automattic.com/sandbox-162/
>
>
As far as I recall, 1.6.2 had an important security fix in it that wasn't
present in the Google code version.



> Unfortunately this version has the same errors (uninitialized variables)
> that the older version has so while it has some updates, it still doesn't
> fix my problem.
>
> Can I submit a patch for this theme the same way I'd submit one for
> WordPress?
>
> For now I guess I will just keep a local copy of the file I modified and
> use that, I was hoping there was some clever way to apply my change to the
> imported file and keep it all in my theme's Subversion repository.
>
>

I used to use Sandbox as a good basis for themes a long time ago, but
abandoned it not longer after the author did. Some of it's best ideas are
now incorporated into core WordPress, but the rest of WordPress'
functionality has left it far, far behind.

There are many better themes to build on. TwentyTen and TwentyEleven were
both built to be exemplar themes using all the latest APIs and techniques
from core WordPress, for example.

Whilst they are bit too designed for some tastes, strip the stylesheet and
you have a very good starting point.


Mike
-- 
Mike Little
http://zed1.com/