NeoBox

NeoBox is no longer being actively devel­oped or sup­ported; I highly rec­om­mend the The­sis theme frame­work for all Word­Press blogs!

Wel­come to NeoBox, my first & (thus far) only Word­Press theme release. Cur­rently no demo blog is set up, but NeoBox hasn’t gone “gold” yet and is still being actively devel­oped to fit my vision for it.

Require­ments

An excel­lent theme … Thanks for shar­ing it. — gestroud

I made the deci­sion that NeoBox should be as future-forward as pos­si­ble with­out load­ing the theme up with back­wards com­pat­i­bil­ity code or styl­is­tic hacks for sub-par browsers. I real­ize this lim­its my audi­ence, but I do not fore­see chang­ing my mind about this.

NeoBox requires at least Word­Press 2.5 or later as well as PHP 5 or newer.

Styling was done pri­mar­ily using Fire­fox; no guar­an­tees are made about other browsers, espe­cially Inter­net Explorer.

Down­load

• NeoBox 0.6
• NeoBox 0.5
• NeoBox 0.4
• NeoBox 0.3
• NeoBox 0.2
• NeoBox 0.1

Fea­tures

• Two wid­getized side­bars with a cen­ter con­tent section
• Con­tent sec­tion sup­ports media (e.g., pic­tures, Flash) up to 425px in width
• Improved gallery short­code handler
  • XHTML-valid
  • Thick­box support
• Micro­for­mats support
  • hAtom on posts
  • vCard on author infor­ma­tion (posts & comments)
  • rel-external on out­go­ing links
  • rel-nofollow on redun­dant inter­nal links
• Fully designed theme hierarchy
• Tags dis­played on posts
• Quick access to Next/Previous nav­i­ga­tion at the top & bot­tom of posts and archives
• Ran­dom header images
• Ample white­space
• Avatar sup­port if enabled in Word­Press’ dis­cus­sion options
  • No plu­gin required
  • “Iden­ti­cons” used if no gra­vatar is available
• Sup­port for an optional custom.css file in the theme direc­tory, to allow for future-proof cus­tomiza­tions of the styling
• [code]alert[/code] and [code]note[/code] para­graph classes for impor­tant or infor­ma­tional boxes in posts
• Hier­ar­chi­cal head­lines — Adding head­ers to posts? Start with [code]h3[/code] to main­tain the seman­tic flow of content
• Extreme seman­tics — A vari­ety of mean­ing­ful classes are added to the [code]body[/code] tag of every page as well as to each post and com­ment con­tainer [code]div[/code]. The class-specific styling oppor­tu­ni­ties this affords is unbe­liev­able. For exam­ple, if you wanted, you could add to your custom.css file code which would style posts in a cat­e­gory called “Hodge Podge” but that would only affect it when it’s being viewed dur­ing a cer­tain hour of the day!
• And more!

Plu­gin Compatibility

• Brian’s Lat­est Com­ments — Styling & place­ment in the left side­bar when wid­gets are not in use
• Com­mentLuv — Styling
• Flick­rRSS — Styling & place­ment in the left side­bar when wid­gets are not in use
• ShareThis — ShareThis but­ton appears along with post meta infor­ma­tion on sin­gle post & page dis­plays, if auto­matic out­put is dis­abled in the plugin’s options
• Sub­scribe to Com­ments — Styling
• WP-Super-Cache — Mes­sage warn­ing users of Lock Down, if enabled in the caching options

Change Log

• 0.6 — 2008/06/26
  • Sup­port for WP-Super-Cache’s “lock down” fea­ture; a mes­sage is dis­played to new users warn­ing them that their com­ments may not appear for a bit, until the cache is refreshed.
  • Added [code].foreign[/code] to style for­eign words or phrases using an appro­pri­ate tag ([code]p[/code], [code]span[/code], and so on). By default, for­eign text is shown italicized.
  • Renamed numer­ous files to main­tain a con­sis­tent file nam­ing schema.
  • Cre­ated page-links.php, a page which can be used to dis­play your com­plete list of bookmarks.
  • Post meta infor­ma­tion & next/previous nav­i­ga­tion have received some styling updates. This still needs some work to be wonderful.
  • An icon now appears next to the author byline.
  • Some com­pat­i­bil­ity has been added for the ShareThis and Flick­rRSS plugins.
• 0.5 — 2008/06/05
  • Removed options panel (no longer needed)
  • Removed FreeRice banners
  • Extremely seman­tic code (thanks, The Sandbox!)
  • Silk icons sprin­kled throughout
  • Added cat­e­gory descrip­tions (if present) to cat­e­gory archives
  • Added author descrip­tions (if present) to author archives
  • vCard micro­for­mat­ting present through­out, where applicable
  • hAtom sup­port for posts
  • Next/Previous nav­i­ga­tion at the top & bot­tom of posts and archives
  • Tags are now dis­played on posts
  • Brian’s Lat­est Com­ments sup­port — just acti­vate the plu­gin and it’ll work (unless you are using widgets)
  • Avatars enabled on com­ments, no plu­gin required
  • Styling present to sup­port the Sub­scribe to Com­ments & Com­mentLuv plugins
  • Improved Gallery handling
• 0.4 — 2008/05/25
  • Removed hard-coded options from functions.php
  • Intro­duced new Design-panel options page w/ nonce protection
• 0.3 — 2008/05/22
  • Replaced Word­Press’ built in code for han­dling the Gallery short­code with code from the Cleaner Gallery plu­gin.
  • XHTML valid­ity improved, mainly thanks to the new gallery handling.
• 0.2 — 2008/05/21
  • Slow & steady does it!
  • 404.php opti­mized and hope­fully made both acces­si­ble and useful
  • Word­Press gen­er­a­tor meta infor­ma­tion removed from header.php
  • Theme credit added to footer.php
  • Misc. CSS tweaks
  • custom.css file added; instruc­tions for using this file are con­tained within the file itself. Never over­write this file if you have added cus­tom code to it!
  • sitemap.php & archives.php opti­mized. archives.php now dis­plays a tag cloud.
  • Acces­si­bil­ity “Go to Top” link added to footer.
  • FreeRice.com ban­ners added below con­tent pages. It’s a wor­thy cause and should be sup­ported, but if you want to dis­able it, the option is at the top of functions.php
• 0.1 — 2008/04/13
  • Ini­tial pub­lic release — NeoBox is still essen­tially Neo­clas­si­cal; how­ever, SandBox’s seman­tic classes have been enabled on the BODY tag as well as comments.

License

NeoBox is a com­bi­na­tion of two themes; one of which was licensed under the GPL while the other was licensed under a Cre­ative Com­mons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Deed.

Basi­cally, that gives you free­dom to of course use NeoBox on your blog, but also to tweak it and to release your ver­sion of it as well — pro­vided it is licensed under the GPL and the same or sim­i­lar Cre­ative Com­mons deed. If you release a theme based on NeoBox, please pro­vide attri­bu­tion by link­ing to this page as well as to the devel­op­ers of its major base ele­ments (see Cred­its).

If you are using NeoBox on your site, you are under no oblig­a­tion to credit any­one for the style, but a link back to here and those listed under “Cred­its” some­where on your site would be a nice treat.

NeoBox in the Wild

If you are using NeoBox, I want to thank you by link­ing to you here. I may not notice that you are using my theme, so feel free to let me know!

• Fikir­bozan
• Indie Girl Photography

Cred­its

• Andy Skel­ton & Scott Allan Wal­lick for devel­op­ing The Sand­box from which I’ve used numer­ous func­tions and other seman­tic devices.
• Chris Pear­son for devel­op­ing Neo­clas­si­cal, one of the most beau­ti­ful Word­Press themes upon which I’ve ever laid my eyes.
• Mark James for squint­ing through the devel­op­ment of the delight­fully use­ful Silk icons set.