Blog styling in SASS

Question

Every so often I get a request like this:

"Build a site using WordPress as the CMS [easy...]. Oh and we'll have a standard looking blog thrown in. No need to worry about styling, the default look will do"

Styling the site is easy - custom HTML and SASS written. The problem is the blog. Save for starter themes like Bones, Sage & _s (which are unstyled), I've yet to find any pre-styled themes that have the blog styling as a separate component.

So my option is either to hack the CSS stylesheet from an existing theme (cutting out the page-related bits, and leaving a larger file size than needed), or write it all from scratch.

Before considering starting a project to do this, is there a blog-only theme that can be mixed-in to my SASS? You know, comment styling, next/prev, the sidebar boxes; galleries, 'Posted on' and the like. All the tedious stuff you don't want to redo on each project, but can be tweaked to work when a client doesn't want something custom.

Update

Regarding what stays the same between the main site and the blog: my take is that overall design is the same (header/footer, colours, typography), and the content-styling is different (the blog has unique elements and the layout is different with a sidebar)

Answer 1

Well what is part of the blog and what belongs to the rest of the site will probably differ so it is hard to split. E.g. is header and footer the same? Anything else that is shared?

Anyway, here are two options:

1.Separate instances

If the blog and the rest of the site look totally different you may consider separate WordPress installs or a Multisite instance. This way you can have different themes for each of them.

2.Switch theme for blog URLs

You could just have a different theme and switch depending on where you are. This answer handles that. It switches on user agent which you'd need to adapt, but the theme switching part is explained pretty nicely:

Load a theme based on browser detection