Tersus

An achingly simple WordPress theme without all the usual cruft.

About

Tersus is an exercise in publishing template minimalism.

Why create yet another theme? As clean and stripped down as some themes are, we wanted to prune things a bit further.

Tersus was originally named Simplicity — a term that described exactly what the project was all about. However, that was prior to the discovery of a WordPress theme already using that very name. After a brief discussion, several Latin terms were bandied about as replacements. Tersus (which means ‘clean, neat, or cleansed’) seemed to fit the bill rather nicely — and here we are.

A version of Tersus is being developed for Tumblr and is also available on GitHub.

Keep track of Tersus development on Twitter.

Features

HTML5 structure and compliance
CSS that has been reset and built from the ground up
Non-semantic, presentational markup has been dispatched
Built-in theme options for navigation, sidebar, and announcement text
Responsive, adaptive layout for small screens
Clean, valid, and awesome

Child Themes

By removing the majority of the presentational markup from the Tersus parent theme, we’ve opened the door for child themes to pick up the aesthetic slack. There are currently two child themes being developed for Tersus.

Splorp by Grant Hutchinson
Super Ginormous by Chris Harrison

Credits

The Tersus project is brought to you by Chris Harrison, Grant Hutchinson, Dan Rubin, and Andy van der Raadt.

Lovely chaps, all of them.

The groundwork for Tersus was based on the Starkers theme created by the affable Elliot Jay Stocks.

We’d also like to give some props to the fine individuals and handy resources which have made the development of Tersus much more enjoyable. Currently on the guest list are Grettir Asmundarson, Beau Calvez, David Kendal, BBEdit, CSS Lint, GitHub for Mac, Google’s Rich Snippets Testing Tool, and HTML5 Shiv.

Cheers.

Licensing

The Tersus theme is absolutely free and conveniently licensed under GPL. You may use it for personal or commercial projects, as you see fit. Please refer to the license.txt file included with the source for more information.

Portions of the stylesheets are based on the YUI CSS Reset and YUI CSS Base tools provided as part of the Yahoo! User Interface Library. All of the YUI Library components are provided free of charge under a liberal BSD license.

The HTML5 Shiv script is licensed under MIT/GPL2.

Version History

0.2.0 - The “Flavourless” Release

Removed theme ‘flavours’ and the related switching option
Theme styles are now supported via child themes
Theme now uses both parent and child theme favicons
The theme version is once again displayed in the footer
The name and version of the child theme are now displayed in the footer
Fixed improperly generated gallery description lists
Fixed display of empty wrapper elements on post and archive pages
Standardized comment navigation links
Added support for wp_nav_menu navigation menu
Added theme option to toggle the display of navigation menu
Added theme option to toggle the display of theme information in the footer
Added language attribute to <html> element
Simplified subcategory lists
Replaced the externally linked HTML5 Shiv with a local, minified version
Embiggened theme screenshot

0.1.6 - The “Nice Consistency” Release

Added support for category archives
Added support for tag archives
Added support for basic post format styles
Fixed intra-blockquote margins
Fixed widget spacing on advanced layouts
Post formatting is more consistent in archives and search results
Fixed and tuned up non-functional the_excerpt links
Fixed viewport wonkiness on non-desktop screens
Fleshed out hAtom microformats markup
Added smarter handling of parent pages for categories and tags
Replaced the default gallery with a decrufted version
Tidied up the display of attached images
Date stamps are now based on the WordPress Date Format setting

0.1.5 - The “Good, Bad & Less Ugly” Release

New theme options for non-widget’d page, category, and archive lists
Sidebar markup changed to <aside> elements
Wrapped author names in <cite> elements
Added basic stylee for <blockquote>
Super Ginormous layout style is more responsive
Fixed collapsing margins when using advanced layout on small screens
Fixed display of archives when widgets are active
Comment lists now use custom callback function
Further decrufting of comments and comment forms
Removed crufty classes from avatars
Consolidated decrufting functions
Fixed stylesheet parsing errors uncovered by CSS Lint
Tidied up the display of search results

0.1.4 — The “Wrap It!” Release

Updated markup to use <section> and <article> elements
New theme option to display site-wide ‘announcement’ banner
Advanced layout style is more responsive
Advanced layout typography and colours have been adjusted
Form elements now have more consistent stylee
Tag lists now only appear if there are tags present
All ‘rel’ attributes now validate
Added current theme style to footer
Removed a schwack of empty CSS selectors
Standardized stylesheet naming conventions
Lots of text consistency tweakage

0.1.3 - The “About Time This Thing Was Updated Again” Release

Added theme options for switching between stylesheets
Added ‘Advanced’ and ‘Super Ginormous’ alternate stylesheets
Added support for post formats
Added missing get_sidebar() function to applicable templates
Added fallback for the_title for untitled pages and posts
Changed base font stack to sans serif
Updated simple_post_class to support a format-type classname, if applicable
Replaced static class declarations with post_class function
Standardized ‘not found’ messaging
Standardized and simplified header text and formatting
Simplified ‘older’ and ‘newer’ link text
Fixed invalid textarea attributes
Removed non-valid, IE-specific CSS selectors
Removed get_search_form() function from everywhere except the sidebar
Continued HTML5 conversion

0.1.2 — The “Dustbunnies” Release

Added theme information constants
Added contextual delimiters to next and previous links
Updated sidebar formatting and default ‘meta’ links
Tags and categories are now formatted as unordered lists
Paging links are now consistent top and bottom of pages
Edit links are now consistent
Removed superfluous list formatting around search text
Removed duplicate search form from 404 page
Removed crufty classes from comment lists

0.1.1 — The “We Don’t Need No Stinkin’ Stylesheet” Release

Fixed the ‘headers already sent’ error
Reset and base stylesheets are now based on YUI 2.8.2
Added artwork for the screenshot and favicon files
Updated screenshot.png
Updated favicon.ico

0.1.0 — The “Getting Our Feet Wet” Release

Initial tinkering

funkylarma / tersus Goto Github PK

tersus's Introduction