Of course there was the first paid upgrade, Custom CSS and the Sandbox theme. It was aimed at you more technical folks, since you have to be pretty savvy with CSS to do anything fun with it, but already over 350 blogs have added it.

This is not me cavilling at the lack of acknowledgement of the work that’s already been done in terms of bringing custom CSS to the non-coding masses (come on, I know I’m never going to get official recognition), this is me going ‘that fell kind of flat, didn’t it?’ I suspected they weren’t getting a lot of take-up when they had to introduce the free preview, but 0.1% is even lower than I thought.

I’m not complaining, because said free preview just enabled me to test out the ports and make a couple of necessary tweaks to get them looking their best over here; new versions have now been uploaded. Some of the CSS classes used on wordpress.com are not the same as on the downloadable version of sandbox, which disappoints me because I’d hoped the same stylesheets would work on both, but then total interoperability is a big ask.

Unlikely as it is that any of these stylesheets will actually be used on wordpress.com, it’s an interesting exercise for me and I’m going to continue with the ports, try and get some original designs done, and package them up for use by self-hosters, just in case Sandbox ever does become the default template