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.cssfile and therotatorfolder are now in thecustomfolder: Isolating customizable files is one of the most important aspects of user-friendly, effective software development. In prior versions of Thesis, thelayout.cssfile and therotatorfolder, which are both user-generated, were not included in thecustomfolder, where they clearly belong. - Moved the
.currentindicator 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
- Moved the
imagesandlanguagesfolders into thelibfolder: 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!
{ 31 comments… read them below or add one }
First 2 changes are teh sex.
Thanks!
Heh, that str_split fix looks familiar…
No news on the escaped quotes bug (http://diythemes.com/forums/report-bug/13044-custom-file-editor-escaped-quotes.html) or the use of getimagesize over HTTP before getimagesize via file path issue (http://diythemes.com/forums/bug-reports/11445-server-get-requests-images.html)?
It’s all nice to move some files and folders around for the odd few newbies who might happen to get confused for 2 minutes, but it would be nice to fix the more serious issues that allow the same newbies to kill their site with a white screen via a PHP syntax error from their \’ being re-saved as ‘, and all that un-necessarily wasted data transfer (and in some cases, the host putting in a block) when trying to parse for thumbnails.
Although I failed to mention it above, I’ve also fixed the escaped quotes issue in this release
Thats good news, and should cut down on the number of support requests related to that issue.
As for the second issue I mentioned, I believe the solution is simply to change the order of a conditional, so that it checks via filepath first then HTTP, rather than HTTP then filepath which it does now. I would hope this 10 minute job could be squeezed into the 1.6 final core.
Excellent! Do you have any deadline for final release of this version? Thanks
Mr. Pearson,
Will the final version be available for us poor saps who have only invested in the Personal Option*?
*To clarify: If it were up to me, we would have purchased the developer option. Unfortunately it was up to the rapidly declining budget of the ASU Student Media Department.
Could you please add some classes to the new menu system. For example, instead of just class=’tab-1′, could you make it class=’tab-1 tab’ and the same for submenu and item-1 type elements. I’m doing some styling where the submenu needs to be differently colored than the main menu.
Also, you please make the styles on buttons optional? I prefer the native button styles because that is what people are used to. It looks so weird to have the styling it has has right now. They don’t even look like buttons. For example, look at this page: http://www.sacramentowebdesign.org/?page_id=14
The search button on that page doesn’t stand out at all. I hate haven’t to remove the button styles manually from the core files.
Melvin — That’s not a button style you’re seeing—it’s a complete lack of a style! You’ve obviously removed the widget from the page in question, but I’m curious to know how you even got a Search button in there. By default, Thesis does not display a button on the search widget, so you must’ve added something custom to get this result.
Hey Chris,
I had actually removed the plugin but I just added it back. If you look at http://www.sacramentowebdesign.org/directory/ you’ll see the button for search.
~ mel
I just looked at the CSS and it looks like the styles are actually for all input & textarea elements, which affects the elements as well. Hmm… maybe allow the styles on form elements to be optional… or if there is a way to limit the styles from applying to the buttons.
Also, I noticed a bug. I’m not sure if this was in previous versions.
If you add an image to rotator folder, go to the Design Options page, set a link for that image and then go back and try to remove the link, it won’t do it. It will simply keep the old link.
Good spot here, dude. I’ve fixed this bug, but you won’t see it on a production version until 1.6.1.
Yay
I’m ftping it up to my site as I type this
I am generally happy with 1.6, and agree that it rocks. But I am very unhappy about you moving stuff from folder to folder. Anything that requires some hundreds or thousands of people to spend a lot of extra time when upgrading from version to version should be avoided at almost all costs. The fact that something or other is more logical or cleaner, simply is not a sufficient justification!
Cheers
The move which I find odd, is the layout.css into custom/. The idea being that all files and folders which need their permissions changed (a one-off thing) are now in one place? I would say, however, that now, as this .css folder is in the custom folder, that some may no longer think of it as a core file as it’s now with all the other files they know they are allowed to edit.
The logic of a one-off event has overridden the logic of the long term – if some comes back to it in 6 months time, or a new developer comes along who isn’t familiar to Thesis works on it, then there’s a higher potential for it to get messy…
Hi! Does anyone know how to modify the thesis default text boxes and sumbit buttons? Many thanks in advance.
In version 1.6, the method to change default text throughout the theme is based on internationalization, the technique by which Thesis can be translated into other languages. Instead of translating Thesis into another language, though, you’d simply replace the default text with text of your liking.
Admittedly, this is not as straightforward as an approach as I would like, and as a result, I’ve placed more focus on this area in 2.0 development. Look for this process to become much easier in the not-too-distant future.
Will there be a “button design” option in Thesis 2.0 so you can choose an image of youe choice? And maybe the color of the text fields? Also, I’d love to see the ability to change sidebar buttons to match with the main form buttons.
Anyway, can’t wait to see Thesis 2.0, when can we approx. expect it’s release?
I wanted to view this video review:
“Check out this video review of Thesis 1.6 to see why Nick now builds all of his sites with this powerful software.”
But when I clicked on the link (I tried numerous times), I got this error: “Error establishing a database connection”
Could someone please look into this? I’d really like to watch this review. Thanks!
(There is no contact info for Chris that I could find anywhere on the site)
The destination site was down temporarily this weekend, so that’s why you received the error. The site is back up and working today.
Hi – Help!!
I am panicked because I paid a web fellow to upload my custom header and now with having upgraded this evening to the 1.6 the frigging header has disappeared- I couldn’t figure out how to upload it last time when I started and gave into paying someone so now I am really ticked off that this upgrade didn’t capture it in the custom files I so carefully copied and included in the upgrade- the reason we chose frigging thesis was for the customizable header:(
can you help pretty please?
kindly
julie
….we have an art bar that is all inclusive of the site name etc so I just need the code to upload this entire custom bar.
julie
Chris,
I am a web developer who consider to purchase the theme, but there is one thing I don’t understand clearly:
Can you please explain how the theme generates a cleaner HTML code (besides the fact that the css is always separated from the HTML)?
Thanks
How? Does it matter how?
The real question is “does it?” Does it generate clean HTML code?
If you just look at the code for this website or a website using Thesis (ex. http://www.customizethesis.com), you can verify if it does generate clean code or is it filled with tables & junk.
Thank Melvin, but I think I didn’t ask the question correctly.
What I meant to ask is **in what ways** is the code cleaner?
So you say it doesn’t have any tables, which is good. Anything else??
It’s many things but would take a while to describe. Here’s a brief list:
* Structure of content
* CSS based styling
* Location of content
* Distinct title & meta tags
If you don’t mind I’d like to take this issue a bit further.
The way I understand it now, Thesis’s advantage (code wise), is mostly for the inexperienced developer, because what you listed here can be achieved without much effort if you have some experience in web development.
Let me clarify:
Regarding CSS – I didn’t see many templates that have internal style and if they do I could easily modify it to be external.
Regarding structure and location of content – I assume you mean that the post’s title and content appear at the begging/middle of code with a simple div structure.
Regarding dynamic title and meta tags – there are many plugins that provide this feature.
After seeing Brian’s Clark’s video “Here’s why Thesis rules for SEO and design flexibility” I got the impression that Thesis has capabilities of bringing a clean/plain HTML to the SE, even though the source of it is more complex…(I admit I didn’t understand exactly what it means).
Maybe there is also a tutorial online giving examples of the differences?
Jack, a lot of it is do-able by you but it’s easier, faster and more complete with Thesis. I’ve been building websites professionally since 2001. I started using Thesis last year. 100% of my websites are now using Thesis. It cuts down the work needed to be done and lets you focus on design & content. I’ll leave it at that. I’m not associated with Thesis so I’m just giving you a customers prospective. I find it 100% worth the money.
I’ve had my IRSQuestions.org site on a standard wordpress theme for over a year and just this evening moved it over to Thesis. I’m very pleased with the ability to customize the site in a manner that can be used with other sites. Thank you and I’d like to thank the Thesis development community especially GodHammer and Girlie.
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