It's never easy to lock down a feature, getting the final
touches juuust right and then move on. When working with a feature
that will be let loose into a community and get a life of it's own
it's even harder. Then it's unchangeable and locked down forever,
in the sense that if you change it later on, it will affect alot of
people.
That is the situation with the Blog 4 Umbraco Html structure and
the skinners that hopefully will use this. We needed to get it
right before shipping it, too many people will depend on it. So we
tried out some different options to figure out which ones was most
flexible, viable and not too heavy to work with.
So we worked through:
- The Kubrick theme, easy to work with, included
by default on wordpress accounts and known by many. The html is
clean but not that flexible incase you wanted something else then a
2 column simple blog.
- The K2 theme, tons of features, tons of html,
after working with the html, deemed too heavy to set up without
cutting off too much of the included functionality
- K2 Lite, much better, cleaner html, simple to
work with
So we had actually settled on the k2 lite theme to be included
on the blog. But then, deep inside the wordpress skinning world, we
encountered the Sandbox theme.
Now as you can see, sandbox is very very basic, even more basic
then Runway - our simple website starterkit, but that is the great
thing about it, and also why it seems wordpress is about to include
it by default
And there was already ported
a css version of k2 for it, perfect! It looks clean, the html
is built with css skinning in mind, and everything is pretty clean
- wonderfull.
So after the many considerations on how to pick a theme that
skinners will be able to use, we ended up using an established
standard which already has a community around it. That is indeed
truly wonderfull, and really in the spirit of umbraco. Don't try to
reinvent the wheel, pick somehting works already if it solves your
problem.
So for anyone who wants to build a skin for the blog package,
this is a preview of the finished html. It includes a html page
with the markup and a sample css file. So to start skinning, simply
exchange the css file reference with your own stylesheet.
Download the theme html
We will post the details on how to get the skin into repository,
later today.
UPDATE: The blog is now on nightly.umbraco.org
as an installable package:
http://nightly.umbraco.org/Blog4Umbraco/2.0.17/Blog4Umbraco_2.0.17_633966499098161229.zip