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Thesis 1.6 Final Has Arrived!

October 19, 2009

The new hotness in Thesis 1.6 has been bottled up long enough, and now it’s time for all that sexy to hit the masses. You can go download this puppy right now, or read on for a list of the notable revisions to this final version:

  • Major nav menu enhancements: In addition to adding more flexible class names to the menu elements, I also added parent/ancestor highlighting (and corresponding design controls!) to the nav, which is all-new for 1.6!
  • Two new nav menu hooks! I’ve added hooks both before and after the list items (<li>) in the nav—thesis_hook_first_nav_item and thesis_hook_last_nav_item.
  • Fixed multimedia box font and color controls: In previous versions, if you used the custom box to display stuff, you had to create your own font styles and color settings via custom.css. Now, that looks like the dark ages because you can style your multimedia box directly from the Design Options panel!
  • Removed the !important declaration from the .top class: This one’s pretty technical, but it will prove useful to those of you who are intense CSS tweakers.
  • Post images and thumbnails are now faster and more efficient! Thanks to @garyj’s keen eye and Thesis user “quill,” I was able to eliminate a redundant HTTP request for each post image or thumbnail that loads on your site.
  • Relegated IE8 compatibility code to its own function: Even better, this function only runs when Thesis detects that the user is browsing with IE8.

The Bottom Line About Thesis 1.6

Thesis is unique because it solves a wide array of problems that affect everyone who runs a website. In addition to conquering mission-critical tasks like SEO, site speed, and layout flexibility, version 1.6 now offers design controls that allow you to change the look of your site—think colors, borders, and backgrounds—without touching a bit of code (not even copying and pasting CSS!).

In short, if you run a website, then you can use Thesis to make your site better.

Thesis 1.6 has arrived. Make it yours!

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I Just Dropped 1.6 Beta 2, and 1.6 Final is on the Way!

September 27, 2009

So far, Thesis 1.6 beta has been very well received, and I just put the finishing touches on another (and hopefully final) set of revisions for this release. Find out what happens when you take some awesome and add a little elbow grease by downloading Thesis 1.6 beta 2, or read on to see what’s new.

  • The layout.css file and the rotator folder are now in the custom folder: Isolating customizable files is one of the most important aspects of user-friendly, effective software development. In prior versions of Thesis, the layout.css file and the rotator folder, which are both user-generated, were not included in the custom folder, where they clearly belong.
  • Moved the .current indicator in the new nav menu to the containing <li> element (instead of the <a> inside the <li>). Thanks to this move, CSS ninjas will have more flexibility, so I expect to see some sick custom navs very soon :D
  • Moved the images and languages folders into the lib folder: Better file organization means less confusion (during installs, upgrades, etc.) for newbies and experts alike. Filed under: “I should’ve done this a long time ago.”
  • Fixed the nav menu so that pages in your dropdowns can contain more than 5 items. Whee!
  • Nuked a PHP5-only function: Turns out that str_split, which I used in the creation of the new layout shadow effect, was PHP5-only. Weaksauce. To compensate, I wrote an even better function that accommodates both 3 and 6-digit hex color values. PHP5? Pwned.
  • Repaired broken links in the options panels. Pretty self-explanatory, this one.

Note: If you’re upgrading to Thesis 1.6 and bringing an existing custom folder along for the ride, be sure to move the rotator folder and the layout.css file into your custom folder—Thesis will be looking for it here!

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It’s Thesis 1.6… And a Whole Jar of Awesomesauce!

September 8, 2009

This is the release that was never supposed to happen. Back in June, I began working on what I eventually dubbed Thesis 2.0, so I had no reason to believe we would ever see a Thesis 1.6. But then, a funny thing happened…
I dove into the 1.5.1 core files to solve a little problem with [...]

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WordPress 2.8? There’s a Thesis 1.5.1 for That.

June 11, 2009

Unless you’ve been hanging out in the real world and avoiding the Web (how dare you!), then you’ve probably heard that WordPress just cranked out its newest version, 2.8. Bottom line? The new widget interface is flat out awesome, and even better, the WordPress code ninjas fixed some things that actually improve the Killer Recent [...]

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