Thesis Theme 1.2 for WordPress

The WordPress Thesis theme is now at version 1.2 and there are a few changes as well as a bit of an overhaul in the plumbing – the guts of the theme.

While upgrading, if you follow the instructions by renaming your current thesis theme folder to something like thesis-old and then copy over the new thesis to the themes folder in WordPress, you’ll have all the newness that the Thesis theme offers.

However, you’ll also lose any customizations, so they advise to copy over your custom folder and your rotator folder if you’ve customized anything in those folders. Otherwise, you can do a straight copy of the theme and everything will be good.

Thesis theme developer Chris Pearson has moved some of the internals around making for more of an “object-oriented” style of coding. This makes things a bit more manageable but sometimes harder to find things you’d like to customize because of the “normal” way WordPress themes have been developed in the past.

Here are a few things I customized when the theme was released and now some I don’t need to customize because I’ve been able to use the new options that are listed in the thesis options page.

Footer Code

The Thesis Options page has a section where you can include code that goes in the footer. For example, stats tracking code like Google Analytics, HitTail.com code, or anything that makes sense for you to stuff in the footer before the final </body> tag.

The Loop

The various loops has been moved into a file called loop.php which makes it more centralized for different kinds of pages – WordPress Page, WordPress Posts, Archives, etc. I did modify this for the single page post by adding end of post type code – Google Adsense, Related Posts, etc. I’m sure this has the potential to make its way into the Thesis Options page as well, but we’ll see. The loop.php file sits in the thesis/lib/functions folder.

So how am I going to make sure I update this for the next upgrade? Well, assuming the loop.php file stays in the same location, I’ve documented what I’ve customized and commented my additions/changes in the file itself.

Custom Functions

I had changed the custom function php file to include some changes to the post title byline, but now I don’t have to because they’ve included more customization in the Thesis Options page. Excellent.

Custom CSS

The only file I kept was the custom.css changes I’ve made for the custom styles I’ve implemented.

The Main Index

I don’t like the { X comments } in the main index at the end of each post so I removed them by commenting out one line in a file called launch.php that registers different actions. The action is a hook at the end of each post on the main index page.

I could have done it in a different place but for now I’m taking the easiest steps so in future thesis theme updates I won’t have too much to change. Again, documenting and commenting as I go. By the way, I use consistent text like “comment by Bill” so I can search the whole folder structure in the future and quickly and easily identify where I’ve changed things.

Also, on hooks, hooks are places in code where the designer/developer stick place marks so to speak, that we can use to do more customizing via a page like the Thesis Options page. It will be interesting to see how many show up over time.

The Footer Revisited

I commented out the original footer signature in footer_functions.php and replaced it with my own which are the three, right-justified lines at the bottom of this page. The way I did this was copy and paste what was already in the footer_functions.php file and adjust the text I wanted. However, there is a few options for the footer text on the Thesis Options page.

More Cha-Changes

I’ve only talked about a few of the many changes in the Thesis theme and with more options that have been added like the display options that affect the title of your blog and optional noindex and nofollow attribues on your tags, the options are getting close to providing what some SEO plugins offer. Some of this (SEO stuff) has been discussed via the custom fields in WordPress.

By the way, one other piece of custom code I removed, the tags code that I provided in the single page php file, because it is now provided on the Thesis Options page. Nice. I’ve only touched on the Thesis Options page but there is also the Thesis Design Options page which has everything to do with looks – font sizes, columns, etc.

On columns, I’d like to see 3 columns – one on the left, the middle content and one column on the right, sizable of course.

Summary

I’d love to see a Thesis IDE (Integrated Development Environment), maybe. There could be hooks everyway and the IDE would allow folks to just pick options, plop code here and there – plop ‘n play. Of course, a mini-preview screen that updates as you select different options. Okay, I’m going over board here.

As I work with the Thesis theme I start to wonder when the Thesis Options page will stop growing and be broken up into smaller chuncks. Obviously as functionality is added, the options page will grow.

Tagged as: chris pearson, DIYthemes, thesis theme, Wordpress Themes