First, let me openly admit that I’m not a master coder or programmer. I’m fair with design and OK with code but that’s it. Any information I give here bears no more importance than my own meandering opinion.
Comparing Sandbox to K2 is like comparing apples and oranges, really. The only things they have in common is they are both made for WordPress, they both utilize skins and they’re both killer themes. Though it is worth pointing out here that K2 is “technically” not a theme, it’s a mod. The difference between a theme and a mod is minute but important. K2 essentially changes the way WordPress functions. In that sense, I suppose Sandbox could be considered a mod as well. But that’s not the point of this discussion. I’m here to compare K2 to Sandbox and that’s what I’ll do.
K2
K2, from my view, is built to be a “plug-n-play” theme. You download the theme, install it on your server and then when you want to add a feature you just download the appropriate WordPress plugin and install it. All the code necessary to display many of the most popular plugins is already in place within the exceedingly complex K2 framework. This is done largely by use of conditional php calls and a healthy dose of voodoo magic. I still don’t fully understand how K2 works. The developers of that theme are seriously geniuses. K2 also comes pre-styled and has the ability to add skins to the theme. I think that K2 is a great theme for someone to use who doesn’t like to mess around with code and still wants a theme that has some really great features ‘out of the box.’
Sandbox
Sandbox, from my view, is not at all a “plug-n-play” theme. Unlike K2 it comes (almost) completely unstyled and has no code in place to support any plugins code in place to support only a few extremely popular plugins such as Subscribe to Comments. It’s a Tabula Rasa, so to speak. The strength in sandbox, as far as I can tell, lay in its robust markup, its implementation of microformats and its skins. The skins feature of Sandox is similar to that of K2 though I think it’s a very under-utilized feature. I didn’t create a skin for my current blog design as my needs necessitated the change of some of the markup. Speaking of which, if you like my original unsleepable theme (which utilizes K2) but you want to use Sandbox there’s a skin available that will take Sandbox and turn it into unsleepable.
Both K2 and Sandbox are great themes for WordPress, they just have different goals in mind. One is made for people who don’t want to muck around with any code and the other is perfect for people who want to jump into the code and become immersed in it. Feel free to disagree with me on this, I’m by no means an expert.
