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Thesis Theme Review

by Chris on May 8, 2010

Simple put, I love the Thesis Wordpress Theme. I use it for almost all my sites and it is simply the easiest way for me to setup a nice looking blog that can be customized for whatever niche I am in. I liken it more to a Wordpress Theme framework, rather then just a standard Wordpress theme since it is so flexible and gives you a huge amount of control when designing your site. The latest Thesis Theme 1.7 release adds some great new bells and whistles, and makes working with your sites that much easier. In this Thesis Theme review, I just wanted to highlight some of best things I like about Thesis Theme.

Thesis Theme – Easy Layout Customization

Thesis Theme Design Options

With most Wordpress themes, you are usually stuck with whatever column layout it was designed for. So unless you are a html/css whiz, it can be really difficult to change from say a two-column layout to a magazine style three-column layout. Not so with Thesis Theme. One of the options in the Design Options page is the ability to change the number of columns you want in your layout on the fly. Just specify the number of columns you want in the settings and your blog changes instantly. If want a three column look (1 content column, 2 sidebars), just select it with one click. You have complete control over the widths of each column, and you can even change the order in which they are displayed. This is amazingly powerful, and the basis to designing your site exactly how you want it.

Thesis Theme – Change the Look and Feel

You will likely want to change the colors, fonts of the various sections on your site. These can all be changed from with the Design Options pages as well. Thesis Theme integrates an awesome color picker widget that makes choosing the color you want really simple. If there’s something you want to change that can’t be done in the control panel, then you can add some CSS styling using your site’s custom stylesheet. The Thesis developers wisely separated this out from the main Thesis stylesheet so all your customizations are easily ported over during any Thesis updates. If you really want to change the look of your site, you can also try one of the many Thesis skins available. There are many free and premium Thesis Theme skins that you can try and some of them are really cool.

Thesis Theme – Other Cool Features

Other Thesis Theme features I really like a lot are the ability to add your own analytics tracking codes directly from the control panel. So if you use some analytics software like Google Analytics or Piwik, it can be easily integrated into your site. Thesis 1.7 also integrates with all the popular javascript libraries like JQuery, Prototype, Mootools and others so you can easily add cool Ajax effects to your blog. Just select the javascript library you want, and start using it – no downloading required! You can do some really cool things with the Thesis Theme multimedia box as well. Basically, it is a place on your site which you can use to rotate pictures, show Youtube videos, or even add banner ads to your site.

Thesis Theme – SEO Ready

One thing I’ve always looked for in a good Wordpress Theme is to see how SEO friendly it is. For other themes, I’ve always downloaded the All-in-one SEO pack wordpress plugin to help with my SEO efforts. With Thesis Theme, you no longer need download a separate plugin like this. The theme makes it really simple to do things like customize your blog and post titles, update the meta tags for your posts, category and tag pages, and a whole lot more. Thesis Theme is SEO ready out of the box, and another reason why I like using it so much.

Thesis Theme – The Community

Finally, Thesis Theme has a really amazing community. It is probably the most popular premium Wordpress Theme out there, and adoption of Thesis Theme has grown really fast since it was first released. The developer of Thesis Theme, Chris Pearson is awesome, and you can tell by the frequent Thesis Theme updates that he is really dedicated to making Thesis the best Wordpress theme available. If you ever have any questions, there is also a very active Thesis Theme forum that I recommend you join. Plus as you can tell from this Thesis Theme tutorial site and others, there are a ton of third-party sites that are built around Thesis Theme and dedicated to helping you make the most out if it. As you can see, I really enjoy using Thesis Theme and I hope you enjoyed reading this Thesis Theme review. Come join our community and start using Thesis Theme.

Check out Thesis Theme

2 comments

Customizing the Thesis Number of Comments Display

by Chris on April 5, 2010

One question I always get asked is how to change the way Thesis displays the number of comments for a post. By default, Thesis displays the number in curly brackets like this:

{ 0 } comments.

I am personally not a fan of how this looks, but fortunately Thesis makes this extremely easy to customize.

First open custom_functions.php and add this line to the bottom

remove_action('thesis_hook_after_post', 'thesis_comments_link');

This will remove the default Thesis number of comments display. Now to add your own custom look, add the following to the same file.

function custom_comments_link() {
  if (!is_single() && !is_page()) {
    echo '<p class="to_comments"><a href="';
    the_permalink();
    echo '#comments" rel="nofollow">';
    comments_number(__('<span>0</span> comments', 'thesis'), __('<span>1</span> comment', 'thesis'), __('<span>%</span> comments', 'thesis'));
    echo '</a> </p>';
  }
}
 
add_action('thesis_hook_after_post', 'custom_comments_link');

Basically, this is the same code as before, but without the curly brackets. You can then use the to_comments css class to customize the number of comments look to your liking.

1 comment

What’s New With Thesis 1.7

March 31, 2010

It took a little longer than we thought, but Thesis 1.7 was just released today. So what’s new in this latest version of Thesis?

Thesis 1.7 is faster and more efficient. Developer Chris Pearson has rewritten a significant portion of the code to make things noticeably faster. You should see the page load times [...]

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Customizing the Thesis Nav Menu

February 20, 2010

In Thesis 1.6, the navigation menu design was given an overhaul. Now the basic Thesis Navigation Menu looks like this:

<ul class="menu">
<li class="tab tab-home current">
<a href="http://thesisthemetutorial.com">Home</a>
</li>
<li class="tab tab-1">
<a href="http://thesisthemetutorial.com/about">About</a>
</li>
</ul>

There are also a bunch of new navigation menu customization options in the Thesis Design Options interface. All the basic options can be tweaked including attributes [...]

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Thesis Hooks Explained

February 19, 2010

To really customize Thesis the way you want to, you need to understand Thesis hooks. At first glance, hooks seem like a daunting concept to learn, but they really are quite simple. In this article, let me explain to you what Thesis hooks are, and how to take advantage of them on your [...]

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Swap Thesis Navigation Menu and Header

February 18, 2010

In the default Thesis Theme configuration, the navigation menu is at the top, and the header is right below it. However, using Thesis hooks, it’s quite easy to swap them with a couple of lines of code. Just open up the file wp-content/themes/thesis/custom/custom_functions.php on your server and add the following to the bottom [...]

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Installing Thesis Theme

February 18, 2010

Installing Thesis is quite simple. In this Thesis Theme tutorial, I’m going to show you how to install Thesis onto your blog. This assumes you’ve already installed Wordpress already, but if you haven’t, check out this Wordpress installation tutorial.
Downloading Thesis Theme
The first thing you will need to do is download is download the [...]

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Upgrading To Thesis 1.6

March 28, 2010

I recently had to upgrade one of my older Thesis 1.5 installs to Thesis 1.6. Here are the steps to do it.

In your existing Thesis install, make a backup of your custom folder and any images you may have added to your rotator folder
Upload the new thesis_16 folder to your wp-content/themes directory.
Rename the custom-sample [...]

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