Subtle for WordPress

I’ve been answering some questions on the forum that pertain to some specifics about the layout and design of the default Subtle “theme style” and this made me realize that I probably need to explain a little bit about the underlying core of Subtle and what Glued Ideas does when we release a new version.

First off… Subtle isn’t your average theme.  When we set out to build it for DPBlogs.com, we started out with a bunch of wireframes to outline the content and general structure we thought were important to the site.  We knew we needed to have specific metadata available, advertising, comments, a sideblog sort of feature (to distinguish features from generic blog posts) and we wanted to make sure the home page of a blog wasn’t “blogish” - that it had more of a website feel than a stream-of-posts feel.

You’re probably thinking, “Isn’t that what most theme designers do?”  I hope so.  But that’s where we stopped.  Usually a theme designer then jumps into Photoshop and makes their wireframes into a design and then uses that design to build graphics and then XHTML and then CSS.  We skipped the whole Photoshop step and went straight to XHTML / CSS, creating a VERY generic theme with the most basic layout styling possible.  This is the Subtle Core.

If you ever want to know what the Subtle Core looks like, just set Subtle to the default theme style and rename default.css to default.bak.css.  What you’ll see is what we see when we’re working on Subtle.  No graphics.  No spacing.  No font-specs or colors or anything.  Subtle Core is, at it’s heart, just a set of content and some basic layout.

So what about all of the graphics and fonts and everything else?  That’s where Theme Styles come in.  A theme style is a design for Subtle Core that takes the basics and runs with them.  Theme styles allow someone wanting to customize Subtle to never need to edit the core files (if they’re clever), maintaining the ability to upgrade to new Core installations with a minimal of fuss.  Theme styles also allow for the ability to create versions of Subtle that might look completely unrelated.  Here are a few examples:

• Right Here!
• Digital Photography Blogs
• Aaron Forgue’s Blog

Theme styles handle everything related to the “design” of a page - header generation, type specification, colors specs… you get the idea.  Theme styles even allow you to change the layout of the page.  I’m working on a theme style that moves every major component in Subtle, but doesn’t touch the underlying core at all.

So, what does Glued Ideas do when we release a new version of Subtle?  We limit all of our work to the Subtle Core, making changes to the default theme style if something changes in the Core to require it.  For the most part that means we work on feature requests and fixes to the generic layout of the theme that affect all supported theme styles.  We really try not to make changes to the default theme style, since people tend to expect it to look and feel the same between releases and it provides a benchmark for how Subtle Core should perform when a theme style is selected.

So there’s a little explanation about the difference between Subtle Core and Theme Styles.  Feel free to post comments and questions here in the blog.  We’d love to see more people get into releasing public theme styles for Subtle, so let us know if you’ve created something cool and new that you’d like to open up to the world.