But the best part about WordPress 2.8? Naturally, that honor goes to Thesis 1.5.1, which is hot off the press! Wanna know what’s new? Check out the pedestrian list below, or if you want the full scoop, go read my nerdy Thesis 1.5.1 commentary on the dev blog.

• Post images now appear in RSS feeds! Tons of folks clamored for this one, and each and every one of ‘em was right—this is a must-have feature!
• Fixed tagline font controls: And we’re all gonna pretend that I didn’t screw this one up in version 1.5
• Fixed thumbnail dimension overrides in the in-post editor: Remember when you tried to resize your auto-cropped thumbnail and it didn’t work? Yeah, that sucked. Sorry.
• Fixed JavaScript compatibility issue on the widgets panel: This was only an issue for early adopters of WordPress 2.8, but I feel the need to mention it here anyway.
• New, handy nav menu on both options panels! Quick links to Thesis resources from your WordPress dashboard? Yeah, we’ve got that.

Figure 1. Don’t touch that sexy new nav menu… It’s too h0t.

With version 2.8, WordPress has continued to improve their underlying code, and this makes the Thesis + WP combo even more efficient. No matter what kind of site you’re building, WordPress and Thesis form a killer foundation that will ensure you do all the little, technical things right (without even thinking about them!) while you focus on connecting with your target audience.

Not rocking Thesis yet? Ouch. Go get Thesis and add some awesome to your life.

As you all know, we’re a big fan of hooks here at DIYthemes, with Thesis now containing over 50 hooks allowing for countless and varied customizations (which we love seeing, by the way). The next thing I’m going to mention was quietly introduced in a couple of places in the past, but 1.5.1 has seen the idea greatly enhanced.

The idea? Filters!

What are filters? I’m glad you asked! A filter, like a hook, is a point of interaction within Thesis; just like with hooks, functions are created and added to the filter.

The difference? Filters operate on content that already exists. This means two things:

1. A filter function must accept a variable as a parameter, and

2. a filter function must return the resulting content after all operations on it have been performed.

Before Filter

function custom_comment_intro($content) {

}

You can name your function just about anything you’d like; the import thing is that you allow a variable to be passed to your function. The name of the variable is irrelevant, so for simplicity, I usually use $content.

The $content variable contains all of the output of thesis_comments_intro(), including not only the “add one” text, but the entire div.comments_intro block. All of that markup is available via our $content variable to modify — we can remove it completely, change all of the words to something contextual on our site, use our own markup rather than Thesis’ default, and so on. Sky’s the limit, just like with hooks!

Okay, back to our function. Let’s take our variable and do something with it:

function custom_comment_intro($content) {
	$content = str_replace('add one', 'Shout @ me!', $content);
}

See what we’ve done there? We’ve taken the original $content and modified it using the str_replace() PHP function. Only two more things we need to do to get our customization up and running, so let’s add them in to the mix:

function custom_comment_intro($content) {
	$content = str_replace('add one', 'Shout @ me!', $content);
	return $content;
}
add_filter('thesis_comments_intro', 'custom_comment_intro');

After Filter

Finally, we add our custom function as a filter on the thesis_comments_intro item.

Phew! Well, that’s filters in a nutshell, and I am considering 1.5.1 as merely our first steps into that territory. Hooks have allowed you to add your own content for a long while now; filters are going to allow you to modify what’s output by Thesis itself. It won’t be long before you’ll be able to build a site with Thesis that will be virtually unrecognizable as Thesis. And I like that idea. I hope that the community of designers and users really embrace the use of filters just as you have done with hooks.

I’ll be putting together some documentation over the next couple of days, explaining what the default content of these hooks are and so on, but I don’t want to close this post without a list of the currently available filters:

• thesis_trackback_link
• thesis_trackback_datetime
• thesis_allowed_tags
• thesis_comments_link
• thesis_comments_intro
• thesis_avatar
• thesis_comments_navigation
• thesis_content_classes
• thesis_img_caption_shortcode
• thesis_body_classes
• thesis_get_header
• thesis_get_footer

Let the games (and experimentation) begin!

While it’s nice to claim that all the work I did resulted in a measurable efficiency improvement, it’s much nicer to check out some graphs that show just how slick Thesis 1.5 really is. Thanks to Thesis rock stars Michael Gray and Bruce Keener, I’ve got some interesting data that reveals the true efficiency gains that Thesis 1.5 brings to the table.

Data? We’ve got that.

Because Thesis is constructed entirely of HTML, CSS, and PHP, its overall efficiency depends on the efficiency of each of these individual elements. As I mentioned earlier, Thesis 1.5 contains an all-new CSS constructor, and in addition, a huge portion of the theme’s PHP has been rewritten as well.

In theory, then, (and assuming I did a good job with the rewrites!) we should see some pretty substantial efficiency gains, and this should translate into faster page load times, reduced server loads, quicker options saves, and less overall bandwidth usage across your Thesis-based site. So, the question becomes—does this theory hold true for Thesis 1.5? Let’s find out!

The following graphs show the average time spent downloading a page (in milliseconds) by the Googlebot while crawling the associated sites. This is an excellent way to measure a site’s code efficiency because the Googlebot only loads HTML, CSS, and PHP (while ignoring images). As you can see, switching to Thesis 1.5 made a dramatic difference in both cases, and now both of these sites are, quite literally, 4 to 5 times more efficient than they were before!

Figure 1. Michael Gray’s average Googlebot crawl times (per page) before and after switching to Thesis 1.5.

Figure 2. Bruce Keener’s average Googlebot crawl times (per page) before and after switching to Thesis 1.5.

Figure 2 is especially interesting because Bruce, who is very technically savvy, was unhappy with the way his site ran on Thesis 1.4.2. In fact, his discontent was the primary reason why I set out to make Thesis 1.5 a model of efficiency. Since Bruce is a trusted friend (and also the very first Thesis customer!), I couldn’t help but deliver on this one, and now the entire theme is better thanks to his feedback.

Nothing like a little tough love from time to time, eh?

UPDATE: Thesis user Marko Saric sent me another awesome graphic that does a fantastic job of highlighting the efficiency improvements in version 1.5. Check it out below:

Figure 3. Marko Saric’s average Googlebot crawl times (per page) before and after switching to Thesis 1.5.

Thesis 1.5 is the framework of choice for serious Internet professionals, and efficiency is just one of the many reasons why they consider it indispensable. See some of the big dogs who are using Thesis, or go grab a copy for yourself!

Video Intro to Thesis 1.5

And I don’t know how I forgot to mention this in the video, but the new Site Layout controls now allow you to specify any width you want for your content and sidebars. Fine-tuning websites (in a standardized fashion) has never been easier!

Thesis 1.5 awaits! Download it now or select the option you want to purchase.

Installation instructions after the jump:

Installing the Minimal Skin

After downloading Minimal, you’ll have a folder named /minimal that contains two files—minimal.css and minimal_functions.php. Copy the contents of minimal.css and paste it into your custom.css file. Next, copy the contents of minimal_functions.php and paste it into your custom_functions.php.

Now, go refresh your site and check out the new hotness!

• Full-Width Headers (Update!): Kristen Symonds (@kristarella) updates her full-width headers tutorial for Thesis 1.5.

• Widgetized Multimedia Box: Rick Beckman (@kingdomgeek) provides custom code to “widgetize” Thesis’ Multimedia Box - this allows you to add widgets to the Box just like you can with the sidebars.

• Integrate Advertising: Michael Gray (@graywolf) explains how to integrate advertising into your blog in a way that’s both easy to manage and can make a blog more attractive and desirable to advertisers.

• Greetings, Earthlings!: Dragos Roua (@dragosroua) offers up some custom Thesis hooks which display a “welcome” message based on referrals from social networking sites.

• Skin a Forum with Thesis: Don Campbell (@doncampbell) outlines
  how to install a phpBB forum and skin it to match your Thesis theme.

• Oh, Be-Hive!: Damon Gudaitis (@damongudaitis) explains how he created a Thesis Hive to manage his multiple sites - great for those with the Thesis Developer’s Option.

• New Affiliate Banners!: Our Affiliate Manager, Missy Ward (@missyward) announced the addition of some new affiliate banners for your promotional pleasure. Haven’t joined yet? Sign up today!

Keep the tutorials coming, folks! Send ‘em @diythemes on Twitter so they can be considered for future posts!

• Magazine Style Using Thesis Teasers: Marko Saric shows how easy it is to get a customized magazine style look with Thesis.

• Custom Content Per Category: Want to display different content depending on the category your visitors are viewing? Rae Hoffman (@sugarrae) lays it all out for you in Creating Custom Categories.

• Nifty Nav Menus: The ever-helpful Kristarella (@kristarella) provides an overview of the basic structure of the Thesis Navigational Menu, tips on customizing its style, and how to deal with drop down menus when you’ve added sub-pages to your navigation in Thesis Nav Menus.

• Multiple Custom Page Templates: Bert Mahoney (@berchman) explains how to generate multiple custom page templates in Thesis using hooks and functions.

• Custom Headers Per Page Type: In our Support Forum, Andy Polaine (@apolaine) explained how he achieved custom headers for each page.

• Feature Your Best Articles: Larry at Empty Cabin Media outlines how to highlight a special category of posts in the Thesis Feature Box - styling tips included!

• Header, Hooks, and Social Media Icons: Here’s a two-for-one: Francis Raymond (@francisraymond) details how to customize your Thesis header AND add social media bookmarking links (with icons!) to each post.

• DIYthemes New Twitter Account: Don’t forget to follow @diythemes on Twitter - and use it to let us know about any news, reviews, tutorials and all other Thesis-related info you’d like to see featured here. (The #thesiswp hashtag helps us out too!)

On the other hand, this new version is friggin’ awesome, and I can’t believe you’ve made it this far without frantically clicking the download link for the new goodies. Well done, o’ patient one.

Disclaimer: Thesis 1.5 is currently available in beta release only, which means that there are likely some existing bugs that I’ll need to squash before 1.5 becomes an official release. Only install the beta on a live or production site if you accept this risk and are confident that you can deal with any issues that may arise. Also, you can assist the Thesis community by reporting any bugs that you find in the 1.5 support forums.

Enough with the disclaimers and hoo-rah, take me to where I can download Thesis 1.5!