Creative Synthesis

I’m happy to announce that Press Box, our spiritual successor to Recycled Canvas, is available. It is a simple, striking theme for wordpress we’re using in a few projects. It’s a modern theme with a lot of options, and we’ve been enjoying it for a while.

Download Limited Version | Purchase Premium Version | Current Version 1.0

There are two options for enjoying Press Box:

• Download the limited free version - You can download this version for free under our license to learn. It is limited - it lacks some of the additional includes like the portfolio view, page templates and so on. It also has branding in the footer and sidebar - which we ask you not to remove. The learning mechanism (as specified in the license to learn) sends back fairly invasive stats about your blog (although, not about your users). For details on what these are, see below.



• Purchase Premium Version - You can purchase the premium version, which includes everything (all views, page templates, etc.), no branding and no learning mechanism for $45.00. This version also guarantees support (the free version has no such guarantee, although support might still be provided on occasion). If you are unsure about what version you want, this is the preferred option.

Every purchase helps us fund some of our research and programs. If you are interested in more permissive commercial use (such as reselling or bundling the theme), please contact us directly. The premium version doesn’t necessarily entitle you to these uses.

Theme Highlights

Premium Blog - not Premium Magazine
We consider this a ‘premium theme’, but it isn’t a magazine. It looks like a blog and (if it could) would walk and talk like one too. It does look a little different then a normal blog, and has a few more options, but it doesn’t forget about its past growing up in the blogosphere.

Strikingly Simple
Our goal here is not to create some fancy hand tooled look. For two reasons. One is that those designs become dated fast, the other is that it isn’t as easy to edit someone’s photoshop files. PressBox is strikingly simple, it includes few design elements, imagery or the like. Still, it somehow possesses a unique presence and pinash all its own. From its unique header - which actually looks nice, even without a header image - to its double sidebar - there is an amazing amount going on, even when it looks like there isn’t.

Lots of views
Out of the box, PressBox can be quite a few different things. We prefer to use it with short article previews highlighting some striking imagery. You can just as easily configure it to focus solely on the images (great for a portfolio site like collaborative leonardo’s leo.media site.) - or even make it look just like a normal blog (but a little better).

Options - Plenty of Em.
There are even more little options to customize the theme. PressBox comes with at least four - Simple, Constrasty, Dark, and Professional. They all have a little personality and represent a great starting point for customization.

Not Wordpress Agnostic
Wordpress has a lot of great options and features. Instead of pretending that they don’t exist, we try to take advantage of all of them. Things like: widgets, sidebars, categories (with descriptions!), authors (we’re multi-authors ourselves), tags, page templates (including archives and links - and even a few more), a simple options panel and some common

Side, Doubleside
PressBox makes use of two distinct sidebars. A main sidebar to display on your blog index and a mini bar that shows up everywhere else. The idea here is simple - you want to be more expressive with the kind of extra information you display on the home page. Everywhere else - keep things simple and focus on your content.

Screen, System and Browser Tested
The theme was designed to look great on modern screens and modern systems. We’ve tested everything in all the popular browsers. Things look great in Firefox, Safari, Opera, and Internet Explorer 7 (things look ok in IE6 too).

Flexible
Things scale well in modern browsers, so no worries about accessibility on that front. There’s even a stylesheet to keep things clean on the printed page.

Semantically Microformatty
Microformats are coming, and we love to play around with what works. There is out of the box support for author microformat (great for multiple author blogs) and we’d like to work more in as they come along. We try to do intelligent semantic things, however we do make things pretty generic. We refer to entries as ‘things’ - not posts. We have sections like ‘thing-meta’. These are semantically meaningful only in a very generic way. We hope you extend them to be more specifically semantic where appropriate.

Typographic Choices
We use Helvetica for most headers and for special emphasis. Georgia is used generally for reading text (like the text in a post). We use Verdana in a few offset regions of generally smaller type (the sidebars or the footer, for example). The Courier font is used for pre-formatted text, code and other monospaced entities. We use correct quotes, dashes and similar typographic elements where appropriate. The default font size is 14px, with a 1.4em linespacing.

Appropriately Messy
We aren’t professional theme makers. We make themes because we use them, and we think other people could too. At the same time, a lot of people like our themes. We don’t really think of PressBox as a product. Rather we think of it as the start of a conversation, or as a community. If there are any problems, please let us know - although we can only guarantee support to the people who buy the theme if it is a big bug we’re in the same boat as you (we’re running the theme).

Theme Tracking

For the free license to learn version we have a learning mechanism in the page’s sidebar (which shows up only on the main blog index). It collects some wordpress defined information and some general server information, like: Your blog’s name, your blog’s description, the url, the rss url, the admin email, the wordpress version, the server software, the request time, http referer and user agent information and the remote address.

Premium Support

We give three months of email support. Why only three months? Well if you don’t run into a problem in that time then the chances are that your problem is because you’ve updated to a new version of wordpress that is really different or installed some funky plugin. Please note that we aren’t cold and heartless. This doesn’t mean we won’t provide support for people who don’t pay, it just means that it is much more unlikely.

This page is archived at http://www.creativesynthesis.net/blog/projects/web-commodities/press-box/