Sandbox is a personal website package that provides you with a blog, image gallery, downloads area, and the ability to create miscellaneous custom webpages.

Sandbox was originally designed by Sam O'Connor as a simple package to handle some random postings and other small things. When I took over the project around version 1.0, I decided I needed more. Other blog/website packages like Wordpress only did one thing. Many of them still only do one thing. Most blog packages do not also provide a good image gallery and I have not seen one yet that provides a good downloads module.

You can get these things in separate packages, but integrating them into one site is a nightmare of code bridges and incompatible skinning systems. Sandbox evolved after 1.0 from my desire to have all of these things integrated into one package. The software holds a great deal of potential in the right hands and could function as the front end for a small business, school group, family site, or project headquarters.

General Features of Sandbox:
- Custom pages created on the fly, provided you know HTML.
- Skinning built around the XTemplate PHP class. Change the entire look of your site without ever touching the PHP!
- XHTML 1.1/CSS standards compliant in the default skin.
- Graduated user levels, from totally anonymous, up to full fledged administrators.
- Google Analytics support -Just input your Analytics ID.
- RSS feeds for blog, gallery, downloads, and comments.
- IP banning with CIDR range support.
- Errors for missing or bad links send the proper HTTP status codes to the user agent.
- Error reporting emailed to the site owner. No details of the error are exposed to visitors.
- Support for friendly URLs controlled through .htaccess.
- Full BBCode support throughout most modules.
- Emoticons supported in blog posts and comments.
- Modular sidebar boxes can be enabled or disabled as desired, except for the user login/logout box.
- Contact page to allow visitors to email you without exposing your address.
- Akismet spam filtering built in, all you need is your API key.
- Top level navigation bar you can add to from the AdminCP without having to touch the code or the templates.
- Provides settings to allow for custom copyright footer and/or miscellaneous information.
- Privileged users and above have the option to specify a substitute stylesheet if they choose.