The development of WordPreciousss started in May 2007, and has been a rather bumpy ride.

The main idea behind was to figure out a better way to customize and maintain themes.

The first editions of WordPreciousss (v.0.9 – 2.0) was a theme that used a customized version of the Skinner Plugin that let people add new styles and override the original template files of the theme. This was done by simply creating a skin for the theme.

In Spring 2008 WordPreciousss was remade into a rather complex plugin (v. 2.1 – 3.1.1) that let you have global template files that all themes used, together with letting all themes have skins, and most important: letting you override template files in a Child Theme.

Ian Stewart, the author of Thematic loved that idea so much that he filed a ticket on WP Trac to implement the feature in WordPress.

And guess what? The feature was added in WordPress 2.7

Which leads us to WordPreciousss 4.x-series and today, May 2009.

As the plugin was no longer needed, the decision was made to split the plugin (WordPreciousss 3.1.1) into several themes and plugins, with Precious as the Parent Theme/ Theme Framework.

Release archive WordPreciousss 0.9 – 3.1.1

Below you may download all old versions of WordPreciousss, and study the code. But they probably won’t run or might break in newer editions (2.7 +) of WordPress. – And most important: there is no support on these downloads, so if you decide to try them out, you are on your own.