The Sandbox Designs Competition has now closed, so it’s safe for me to post my entry to the competition, Upstart Blogger Takimata.
Like my other themes, Takimata is a minimalist design, though this time that wasn’t necessarily my goal. I’ve been so busy with WordCamp and various other projects that I hadn’t started on my entry until Thursday. I’d pretty much decided that I wasn’t going to compete. But once I really started to look into Sandbox and began tinkering, I was hooked. I consider Takimata an experiment but, if nothing else, I can now say that all of my themes in the future will use Sandbox as their foundation.
Note: This theme should work with WordPress 2.3. Be sure to download Sandbox 1.0 if you want to use this with WordPress 2.3.
The competition precluded tweaking the template files. Given the lack of time, most of it spent troubleshooting IE bugs, I opted for a relatively simple look with no images. A few CSS cheats in my submission introduce some extra content by way of :before and :after pseudo-classes, but these only display in Safari and Firefox.
Oh, and the Takimata name continues my Lorem Ipsum naming convention, though I have no idea what it means.
Be sure to check out the other Sandbox Design Competition designs. I’m looking forward to seeing them, especially Moo-Point by Will Wilkins, who created a mod of Upstart Blogger Minim.
Preview
Download
Note: You’ll need to first download Sandbox and install it to use this theme. This theme should work with WordPress 2.3, but be sure to download Sandbox 1.0 if you want to use this with WordPress 2.3.
Download Upstart Blogger Takimata.
Instructions
- Upload the sandbox_takimata folder to the root folder of your Sandbox theme folder.
- Replace everything after the commented-out header in the style.css file in your Sandbox root folder with:
@import url('sandbox-takimata/style.css'); - If you would like to give me a credit in your footer (greatly appreciated and possibly even rewarded), replace the footer.php file in your Sandbox root folder with the footer.php file inside the sandbox-takimata folder. Thank you!
- Select the Sandbox theme in the Presentation tab of your WordPress Admin.
License
This WordPress theme is released under the GNU General Public License, meaning you can do pretty much whatever you want with it, but a link back to Upstart Blogger is always appreciated.
History
0.1 My submission to the Sandbox Designs Competition. 07.28.07
Takimata is like nothing I have seen before. I may have to tweak this one too. Possibly just for private use. Awesome job Robert and good luck!
that is truly clever. kind of like a more tasteful version of keen. nice work, and good luck.
Surely great&original theme! It’s not like the other themes around there, possibly not very suitable for blogs, but the other types of sites will do
Really innovative design. Exceptional work. Very glad to have had you participate in the competition. :)
Hey there. I absolutely adore this layout and am dying to use it but I can’t seem to get it to work on my blog. Could you give me a hand? Just go to my website and have a look. Did I put the coding in the wrong place?
Thank you so much!
Jen, I see that something is definitely screwed up. Did you change anything in the CSS file? Try doing a fresh install and let me know if you still have a problem. If you have a problem with a fresh install, I would have to look at your installation to identify the problem. It should work. BTW, glad you like it!
Scott, thanks for your kind comments. I’m glad I participated. I just wish I hadn’t been so stubborn and had gotten an earlier start. Maybe next time!
adam, pmpfan, thanks for your comments. I hadn’t seen keen before; interesting use of mootools.
another great clean minimalist design from upstartblogger
your sense of aesthetics rocks!
I am loving this design. Like all your work, it is a tasteful, clever, and clean.
After uploading the template and making my modifications, I cannot for the life of me make the home content stretch to encompass 4 columns of posts rather than 2.
the test site is http://www.maeker.dreamhosters.com/remaeker/words/
Any advice would be greatly appreciated.
Thanks a lot,
@matt: Glad you like the design. I love your mod of Takimata!
The problem with the posts is this line in style.css:
Just change it so that it clears every fifth post, like this:
.p5, .p9, .p13, .p17, .p21, ..p25 { clear: both;}That should work.
I checked out the demo, but it doesn’t work. could you fix it? many thanks in advance
Fixed. Thanks for bringing this to my attention.
Hi – am I missing something, or there are only footer.php and style.css inside the .ZIP?
Flay – You didn’t miss anything. You will need to download Sandbox for the core files. Then follow the instructions here.
Hello,
I am using Wordpress to redo the website for Artexte, a non-profit documentation centre for contemporary art located in Montreal, Canada (www.artexte.ca – The work I’m doing in wordpress isn’t live yet).
I admire the two-column display of the posts in your Takimata theme. Would you mind giving me a hint as to how you did this?
Thank you kindly.
f.
Felicity – Download the zip code above. Take a look at the included style.css file. The power of the two column posts lies in the
.home .postline of that file.Hey,
Awesome theme you have here! I slightly modified it on my site, but I’m noticing a bug on IE7 (haven’t tested in other browsers). If you cycle through all the posts on my front page, on some of the posts randomly the links to the previous and after posts get duplicated on the right side of the page (which inteferes with my post) and the same set of links are also underneath the post (where they should be). A refresh solves it, but it’ll keep happening randomly.
Would you happen to know what’s wrong?
Thanks!
@Orien: I’m seeing this in Safari, too. Did you change anything in your style.css file? Something is definitely off.
Hi,
The only things that I changed were the colors and the width of the individual posts. However, this bug was showing up even before changing the width. I downloaded the theme from the Sandbox Competition website if that makes a difference.
Thanks again.
As far as I know, there’s no problem with the theme, but changing the width would definitely throw things off.
Hm, the thing is that it was doing this even before changing any width parameters.
I’m not seeing this problem in the demo, so it’s likely you’ve changed something.
I just cycled through the posts on the demo and I’m seeing the same thing happen on random posts.
I’m not seeing it. Which posts?
I saw it on “Writing about code”.
Screenshot
I don’t see a problem in the screenshot. Are we talking about the same thing? You should have next/previous post links on the right side and below the post, but they shouldn’t overlap the post. On your blog, I saw that the sidebar links overlapped your post, but you have the width set wider than the layout allows. Am I missing something? :)
Oh, haha. I think we weren’t talking about the same thing. :)
I was unaware that the links should show up on the right side and below, because when I refreshed the page, the links on the right went away.
That’s very strange. No, they are supposed to be there so if you have a long post there’s navigation top and bottom. But they shouldn’t overlap the post.
Ah, that makes sense. I can change back the width of the posts to prevent them from overlapping, but do you know why they disappear when you refresh the page? If not, how would I go about removing that area (the links on the right)?
Thanks a lot for your help.
They shouldn’t disappear when you refresh the page. But if you don’t want the links, delete this from single.php:
Thanks so much! That fixed it. :)
ub,
i have installed takimata (nice!) at startupcomedyu.com. want to put some space between sidebar widgettitle(s) and widgettext. have been fiddling around, but not making any headway. thanks kindly for any insight.
best,
disregard previous plea for help. solved. again, great theme.
best,
Robert,
How are you? I’m using Takimata (great theme!) at StartupComedyU.com, and I want to add a 2nd column to the blog sidebar. Have been hacking it for a while, but the results have been mixed (e.g., overlaps). So I was wondering: maybe you have thought through some of these issues, and can furnish some quick pointers? Thanks kindly for any attention. And by all means, feel free to point me to the virtual tip jar :-)
Best,
Frank Ruscica
Hi there,
Just installed your theme. I like it very much! But i cant fill in a tagline! and when i do my footer.php disapears.
what’s wrong??
all ready fixed myselff so no support needed anymore
Hey there,
Great theme. Put your credit in Footer! Nice work .New to your work and I’m very impressed.
Pablo
Wonderful theme. Not fond of the colors but the layout is amazing!
Hi Ashley, you may already be aware of this but I was coming back for some older theme love and notice the ‘preview the demo’ for Takimata is linking through to the Moleskin demo. (intentional?).
I’m using this beautiful, beautiful theme and I was wonder how do I put a summary for the post in the main page, cause I would like more… more than the title of the post. How can I do that? Can you help me? Thanks… Priscila
On pages, i.e. http://attractinterestdesireaction.com/aida/?page_id=2 , the blog title is left-aligned
however on the rest of the site, the blog title is central.
how can I change it to be left-aligned throughout the whole site?
Have looked in the CSS but I’m not too experienced!
Thanks.