What is so Zen about this theme you might ask. Zen is like beauty – it is in the eye of the beholder. But Zen in this case it not about a speific style, it has been Zen for me to create the theme. That is my craft.
I have tweaked several WordPress themes before but it still means you stay within the boundaries that theme has. This time I wanted to build my own design from the ground up when it came to CSS. I started with an empty CSS-file and have then added what I need to achieve what I want. It has been fun and a learning experience as well.
I created Zen Sandbox based on Sandbox. This is their own description:
The Sandbox is a theme for themers. It has the ability to be easily skinned, so beginners will feel comfortable styling it since they only need to know CSS. More experienced designers will drool at the rich semantic markup and profusion of classes, dynamically generated by a few functions.
Sandbox in itself is a truly minimalist theme. The really great feature of the Sandbox is its markup. This extensive markup makes it a great engine for a WordPress theme. My initial plan was to use standard Sandbox as a template and build from there. But I gave up since some of the things I wanted to have, like the date-badge in the post tile, got too complicated. I have modified some of the code but am using functions which should make an upgrade easier when I want to do that.
WordPress plugins
I have created a page where I list those WordPress plugins that I currently use at my blogs.
Tools
I use Browsershots to test my web design in different browsers, an excellent service that makes it possible to see what your design looks like in many browsers on Windows, Mac and Linux.