Smpl Skeleton

I’m a librarian who is a self-taught website manager, so I can’t truly call myself a “techie”. I have used simpl_skeleton as the framework for styling 4 different blogs on 3 different hosting platforms. The most difficult step for me was just figuring out how to create child themes in general, using the framework was truly simple.

I’ve been working with WordPress themes for years for my clients, and this is the first theme that answers most of my needs for a straightforward site without unneeded bells and whistles but with my basic wants — A banner of my selected size (just need to comply with the width that *I* selected), font and color selections, simple, simpl, smpl! Perfect! Thank you.

For those posting the less than favorable reviews about inline styles, I’m sorry it didn’t work out for you. For future reference, these are imposed by the theme customizer. This is a mere proof of concept in the event you want to allow your clients to tweak/customize the theme.

The tradeoff to the customizer is inline styles. If you don’t need them, you can just dequeue and delegate to the child theme like so:

add_action( 'wp_enqueue_scripts', 'customize_it_yourself'); function customize_it_yourself() { 	wp_deregister_style( 'skeleton-style' ); }

Poof. Gone.

I was looking for a blank theme, a responsive framework with minimal styles so I don’t need to spend a lot of time over-riding what’s already there. Skeleton is not a blank theme. I would call it more a “no frills” theme, but to “child theme” it is a PITA, especially due to the use of embedded CSS. What *is* the point of this?

There’s no reason at all a “skeleton” theme, made to be a blank slate, should have styles that need to be over-written, much less ones that are embedded with style tags. I shouldn’t have to use “!important” in order to style what is supposed to be a blank theme.

The 2 blue images on the background…that shouldn’t be happening, either.

You’ve already got 10-15 different stylesheets, what is the reasoning behind FORCING a style by way of using the style tags (*after* the child CSS is called)???

<link rel='stylesheet' id='skeleton-style-css'  href='http://www.example.com/dir/wp-content/themes/skeleton-child/style.css' type='text/css' media='all' /> <link rel='stylesheet' id='skeleton-theme-settings-css-css'  href='http://www.example.com/dir/wp-content/themes/smpl-skeleton/css/layout.css' type='text/css' media='all' /> <style type='text/css'>  		body { 			color: #333333; 			font-family: Sans-Serif; 			background-color: #f9f9f9; 		} 		h1,h2,h3,h4,h5 { 			font-family: Sans-Serif; 		} 		a,a:visited { 			color: #3376ea; 		} 		a:hover, a:focus, a:active { 			color: #3376ea; 		} 		#header h1#site-title a { 			color:#375199; 		} 		h3.widget-title, 		#header span.site-desc { 			color:#BE3243; 		}  </style>

If you want to force your styles in the theme, then don’t bill it as “fully child-themeable.”

Despite the posting of an apparent solution to inline CSS by the author, the issue still remains: there is inline CSS that makes this theme extremely unfriendly to power developers. The inline CSS will seriously fuck with your ability to implement your own styles, and the “solution” provided does not work on the latest version of Skeleton that was available on or after 2015-07-31. Despite adding the required code to the child theme’s functions.php, and the selecting of the child theme as the active theme, there was no observed removal of inline CSS in the output:

<style id='skeleton-theme-settings-css-inline-css' type='text/css'> 		body { 			color: #333333; 			font-family: Sans-Serif; 			background-color: #f9f9f9; 		} 		h1,h2,h3,h4,h5 { 			font-family: Sans-Serif; 		} 		a,a:visited { 			color: #3376ea; 		} 		a:hover, a:focus, a:active { 			color: #3376ea; 		} 		#header h1#site-title a { 			color:#375199; 		} 		h3.widget-title, 		#header span.site-desc { 			color:#BE3243; 		} </style>

I await the author’s corrections to his original post.

At first this seemed like s good piece of work, that would easily be adjusted to fit the look and feel of an existing site that was migrating to WordPress. Everything was moving along smoothly until —– we ran into the developer’s penchant for “in-line” insertion of css as well as dynamic style in the head section which of course comes after the style.css is loaded and making it nearly impossible to simple modify the css file.

You are gonna need a lot of time and patience to tweak this theme.

I agree totally with davidfraiser. This is not developer friendly theme. I can’t understand my friend recommended this. Don’t use this theme if you are creating own layout. This is only good for sites who want to to have same layout. This theme has get more headache than any other themes.

Met Smpl Skeleton maak je makkelijk een mooie website. Het is een basis raamwerk dat eenvoudig naar eigen inzicht aangepast kan worden. Op de website simplethemes.com vind je diverse code waarmee je content aantrekkelijk en handig kunt opmaken. En dat allemaal gratis. Zeker een aanrader.

This is my first implementation with WordPress and therefore the first theme I have been using ever.

But I guess it was a very good choice as ther resulting website (still under construction) is very nice.

One of the best things along with it is its responsive design so that it displays gracefully in my cellghone.

Ver elegant.

I can clearly recommend it and it is even for free!

Wau!

I love the flexibility with skeleton. Makes it fast and easy to build responsive sites.

Easy, flexible and very efficient. Love this framework theme with Options Framework Plugin.