The WebZappr

Getting a sandbox theme running on wordpress.com

// October 15th, 2008 // wordpress

At wordpress.com you can get a great blogging platform with very reliable and fast hosting for free. It comes with some restrictions compared to the self hosted wordpress.org version. One of them is that you can not upload your own themes.

Luckily there is the custom css upgrade which allows an easy alteration of the stylesheet of the supported themes. Together with the sandbox theme this still gives you a lot of opportunities to alter your design and get some additional themes running on your wordpress.com blog.

For my blog here I have choosen Sandpress, a winner of the Sandbox Designs Competition

Getting such a theme to run in a wordpress.com blog is quite simple although it takes a little more effort than on a wordpress.org blog.

• First off you need to pick and download a theme and unpack it on your local machine.
• Next thing you should do is to make sure that all the image files are in one directory. So if the theme you have choosen has multiple folders for images, take all these images and put them in one folder.
• Now you need to upload these images to your blog as described in the  FAQ
  
• Then go to your media manager (/wp-admin/upload.php) and check for the url of your images (right mouse button and copy link location on one of the thumbnails should do the job).
• The urls should have something like this structure http://BLOGNAME.files.wordpress.com/YEAR/MONTH/FILENAME for example http://snipplr.files.wordpress.com/2008/10/sandpress.png
• Now we need to alter the stylesheet of the sandbox theme of our choice to fit the new urls. So we just need to open it with a text editor and make sure all the paths for url() items within the stylesheet are matching the new image urls. Usually main work will be done with a simple search and replace of “images/” with “/files/YEAR/MONTH/”
• Now it’s time to activate the Sandbox-10 theme (this should be at /wp-admin/themes.php?pa=4 on your blog)
• Once this is done we are ready to try the altered css file. No need to purchase the css upgrade right away, you can just go to /wp-admin/themes.php?page=editcss on your blog and paste the css file into the textarea. Select the “Start from scratch and just use this” option and hit “preview”.
• If everything looks like expected you just need to purchase the “custom css upgrade” and you will be able to save the stylesheet and store it for your site.

I hope this is of any use for the one or the other blogger out there. It should be simple enough to get a lot of extra themes running and if you need any help just leave me a comment.