While I have nothing against my own creation, Modern-Blue just wasn’t my style.  I had been looking into themes that developers could use — so I wouldn’t need to start from scratch — and I settled upon Sandbox.  It has so many CSS classes built in that I hardly had to modify the template at all!  I changed the page.php and single.php templates to link to themselves, footer.php to show the page generation stats (for example, “25 queries in 1.732 seconds”), and the comments.php template to upgrade to threaded comments.

But enough with the technical gibberish.  Here are my favorite things about the new theme:

It’s purple

This goes without saying.  (My favorite color is purple)

All headings are accessible

With the new style, I can use any heading from 1 to 6  — yep, that’s all of them — in any post.  This means that I get an additional two headings from the top that used to be too big, plus the two from the bottom that used to be smaller than the main text of the post.

The big flashy logo

I always liked big flashy logos.   This one isn’t even made in flash!

I can make nested pages to infinity and beyond

Just when you thought this blog couldn’t get any more annoying awesome, this happens.

The template is somebody else’s

Although that may seem like a bad thing, it’s actually very good.  It means that I don’t have to worry about figuring out the code if a new version of WordPress breaks the theme.  All I have to do is download a patched version of Sandbox, and I’m ready to roll.

What do you like about it?

I’ve listed my favorite things about Daily Llama 3.0, what are yours?

Modern Blue 2.1

The two main features of Modern-Blue 2.1 are threaded comments and color schemes.  Unfortunately, I haven’t been able to make an admin menu yet, so the only way to change color schemes is to go into the code.  However, the code is very easy to understand.  You simply copy a line of code from one file to another, and the template does the rest of the work.

There are three types of color schemes in Modern-Blue 2.1: Single, Multi, and Range.

Single

A single color is used for the entire blog’s color scheme.  The color can be seen in an unchanged state on the borders of the blue bubbles, and the rest of the scheme is calculated by the blog.  I’ve tried lots of different random colors and they all look good.

Multi

A set of single colors is given to the template in the form of an array.  The template takes the array and selects a random array member for each pageload.

Range

This is the most exciting part: With only one line of code, a different color from a range is selected for each pageload.  The theme comes with Red, Green, Blue, and Rainbow, but if you can figure it out, you can make many more.

The only drawback of the new version is that it only works on WordPress 2.7 (which is not yet even in beta) and up.  I have uploaded Modern-Blue 2.1 to this blog, but I will not put it on the official repository until WordPress 2.7 is stable.

Instead of being a plugin, it would probably need to be a theme to prevent the “WTF” response when either your custom template is destroyed when you change a theme, or when you change a theme and your old custom one shows up.

I think I might be able to attempt creating this system, however I won’t need to if someone has already released something similar.