almost effortless

I'm very pleased to announce the immediate availability of k2 lite for Sandbox. This is a port of the fabulous k2 for the wonderful Sandbox.

Porting a Wordpress theme into a Wordpress theme...? Sounds crazy at first, but it's a pretty exciting proposition once you start to grok it. I believe that the good people working on k2 have already done so, and might even be working on a k2 for Sandbox as well.

The original k2 theme is more than your average theme - it's more of a Wordpress extension if anything. It comes pre-packaged with support for a ton of useful plugins, and it does all kinds of cool stuff right out of the box:

K2 is an advanced template for the blogging engine WordPress... K2 is the followup to Kubrick, created by the same author... But more than that. K2 for instance also has an options panel, from which you can select custom styles, upload header images, configure the sidebar to infinitesimal levels, turn our AJAX features on and off and much more.

The thing about k2 is that it does so much, which is a blessing and a curse. It's a blessing because it's so very simple get an advanced Wordpress blog up and running. It's a curse because the theme is so very huge. That means that customization can be difficult and complicated, especially for beginners.

My goal in making k2 lite was to make a version of k2 without any of those advanced features - a version of k2 that maintains the look and feel without suffering from the overhead. To put it into perspective, I was able to trim down the 1153 lines of CSS in the fully loaded k2 theme to 349 lines for k2 lite.

The Sandbox theme is, also, more than your average theme - it's more of a Wordpress platform, I'd say. The idea behind Sandbox is summarized here:

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 themers will drool at the rich semantic markup and profusion of classes, dynamically generated by a few functions.

So, the idea here is to port k2 into a skin for Sandbox. In the end, I think it's a bit more than that, though - it's a lite version of k2!

Sandbox has already garnered the support of Wordpress.com, and is the recommended for use in their first paid upgrade option, Custom CSS. That means the good folks over at Wordpress.com can start using k2 lite on their blogs right away.

Enough rambling... Click here for the theme »

Update 1: Brian released a port of k2 called k2lite in July.

Update 2: I've fixed the CSS to work with the changes introduced in Sandbox 0.6.1.

Update 3: Small changes for the nav-above selector, fixes for ul/li items in post entries.