Scott Wallick, one of the founding developers behind the popular Sandbox theme for WordPress has published an announcement on his blog where he states that he is selling the Sandbox website as well as Plaintxt.org. Scott mentions the following in his post:
I have withdrawn from the WordPress community. Active development of my themes and plugins has stopped simply because I am unable to continue the necessary development. In a way, they have a life of their own.
My WordPress themes and plugins were inspired by other themes and plugins, many of theme long abandoned and forgotten. Yet they remained and influenced me. In this way, I know my contributions will continue. Now, though, I am letting what I created, plaintxt.org, live on without me—for better or worse.
Purchase of the sites will include the domain and content within them. Hosting will not be included. These two domains already have an established brand built on top of them within the WordPress community and that is essentially what you would be buying into.
I have personally never used the Sandbox theme but without a shadow of a doubt, Sandbox is a word I have heard mentioned countless times since I began to take an active role within the WordPress community. In fact, there has been and continues to be discussion on adding the Sandbox theme as a default theme for WordPress. Whether that will happen or not remains to be seen but one things for sure, Scott, Sandbox, and PlainTXT have certainly made a positive impact on the entire WordPress community.
I have invited Scott to appear on a future episode of WordPress Weekly. I’ll let everyone know if he agrees to do so or not.
Hat tip to Ian Stewart
It’s looking likely that the Sandbox theme will be integrated into WP 2.8 anyway. So development of the theme can be handled with WordPress itself.