Themes are styles or looks of websites, separate from your content or menu structure. They do need to be tailored to the content management system. Wordpress allows a great deal of freedom in creating themes. This does mean that in choosing someone else’s theme one does not always know whether it has been fully tested, whether all the necessary styles have been defined and even whether it produces valid html or css.
A good theme is also flexible enough to produce very different looking websites. In Wordpress at least it must be “widget enabled” - this gives you control over the items that appear in your sidebar or possibly also in your footer and header. Then it should produce good html with a number of css tags. And of course in this day and age it should also allow itself to be translated. If you don’t see “__” or “_e” in the code where the text gets generated, then it is not a translatable theme.
The Sandbox theme is a good example - it is simply powerful with rich semantic markup and its class-generating functions. It is the product of a collaboration between Andy Skelton and Scott Allan Wallick. Looking at this theme and the various styles that others have developed for it, highlighted to me the power of the sidebar function in wordpress. Sandbox allows for two, where depending on the style or css used, these sidebars could be headers or footers - why stop there I thought! Stay tuned for more on that.
As a start, the “amr ballet” theme was developed using Sandbox as a base and Lim Chien Yee’s Elegantly Presented theme as starting point.