Okay, so it is done. Well, almost.
Since Don has been kind of m.i.a., I have started to develop a new default frontend template called
2k11 (little side blow to those WP fellas there, but also to pressure myself into finishing this in the near future).
Some disclaimers before we start debating it:
*
Philosophy: 2k11 is meant to be a default template for fresh s9y installations, but also a starting point for new templates to be built upon it. That's why it doesn't and will never have as many theme options as Bulletproof. If somebody wants to take this and add all those nifty features BP has, fine. But the base template will only have a few options. Ever.
*
Looks: It is really hard to design something everbody likes, so I went with "plain and simple". Yes, it
does resemble the WP default theme(s). It also does not resemble past s9y default themes very much, but it does honor the s9y corporate design. (At least I hope so.) So don't expect anything too fancy here, that's just not the point.
*
Technical: It's HTML5 (based on v2 of the HTML5 Boilerplate), it's responsive (i.e. it adapts to the user's viewport; yes, even down to smartphone screens). It uses Modernizr 2 to enable new HTML5 elements, therefore it
will break in old IEs with JS disabled. Big whup. It does use some CSS3 features, but with a sensible fallback for older browsers not supporting those. It should also be rather accessible because of the use of a CSS-only layout, wai-aria landmark roles and proper form markup. As of now, it is also completely untested for browser compatibility in any version of IE. (Will do that later.)
*
s9y compatibility & features: It will require at least s9y v1.6, I guess. Basically because it uses the new built-in navigation. As of now, it has support (i.e. templates and styles) for the basic and commonly used core plugins, plus for some popular non-core plugins (freetag, static pages etc.).
*
State of development: I guess about 95%. It does have some issues which need to be addressed, some of them might even require changes to the core, most of them related to switching to HTML5 markup. The code is on GitHub, I intend to keep it there. I figure it will be better to develop it there and include snapshots in the s9y core. Contributions are welcome
on GitHub. (But please have some patience, I'm still learning how to use git myself. I also did not include a GitHub url because of the url limit in the forum.)
More theme options/features:
* flexible layout, up to two sidebars; sidebars are created according to the positioning of sidebar plugins in the backend, i.e. by moving a plugin to a sidebar
* theme options:
- setting the date format (globally)
- including a banner img from the s9y media db (responsive img, not displayed on small screens)
- using a font from the Google webfonts directory (yes, it
does have a proper fallback and an option to not use webfonts at all for the Google skeptics); choose one of 5 fonts pre-selected by me
That's it. No feature creep, remember? I also probably forgot to mention something.
Okay, so now you guys probably want to see some screenshots, right? These were taken in Google Chrome in 1280px width (unless indicated otherwise) using the Droid Sans webfont and a banner img. Here you go:
* start page:
http://dl.dropbox.com/u/691134/2k11/start.png
* single entry w/ comments:
http://dl.dropbox.com/u/691134/2k11/entry.png
* standard contact form:
http://dl.dropbox.com/u/691134/2k11/contact.png
* static page:
http://dl.dropbox.com/u/691134/2k11/page.png
(More screenshots and info in follow-up post.)
, I'd like to see a new, modern default frontend template. And by default, I mean default as in "Serendipity 2.3".
So I really do think it is worth to rename (or make a copy S2, S3, S4) these templates to simplest reveal their purpose on first sight.
