This article is deprecated! Any technical information refers to software versions that are now obsolete. Please visit the DIYthemes Blog for current updates, or check out the old Thesis Blog for a treasure trove of website marketing insights.
We’ve always felt that admission into the support forums was a pretty sweet deal for DIYthemes members, but I got to brainstorming the other day and came to the conclusion that the forum can be much more valuable to our community.
I put together a brief proposal, sent it off to Chris, and just a few hours later — as in, you can see the changes on the board right now! — everything was set up on the board: 10 new forums to accommodate a variety of topics to help you get the most out of not only Thesis, but of blogging in general.
Version Specificity
Perhaps the biggest change is that with each major version of Thesis (beginning with 1.5), fresh forums will be created specifically for that version and its point releases (e.g., 1.5.1). The four forums for Thesis 1.5 have already been created, which can only mean one thing: something awesome is on the horizon, and these forums will be unlocked when 1.5 is released.
Older forums — in this case, the five forums we all know, love, and have been using for months — will be moved to an archival area forty-five days after the release which antiquates them. For example, forty-five days after the release of Thesis 1.6, we will archive the forums used for version 1.5.
By doing this, we hope to keep the forums cleaner, more specific, and easier to search.
DIYthemes Forums
New to the board are three non-Thesis DIYthemes forums, created specifically because of feedback I have received about these forums being needed!
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DIYthemes Discussion: For anything DIYthemes related that doesn’t fall into any other category, this forum is for you. Discuss our future, our blog posts, our site in general, and whatever else may be on your mind.
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Classifieds: From this point going forward, users will no longer have to wade through a customizations forum to find designers to work on their site. The classifieds forum will provide a central location for users to post jobs and for designers to seek work. For better results, link to your posts in this forum on Twitter along with the #thesisdesigner hash tag!
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Affiliates Program: Our affiliates program has been a tremendous success, and in order to better facilitate our users’ money-making ways, we have opened a forum just for affiliates to discuss best practices, share Thesis ad graphics, or anything else which may be of interest or benefit to affiliate program participants.
While we like to think Thesis holds a special place in you and your blog’s heart, we know that other elements go into making a killer site that people just can’t get enough of, so we’ve also opened a few forums to take you beyond DIYthemes!
Beyond DIYthemes
These forums are being provided as a courtesy only and are about as unofficial as they come; still, we hope that they will be altogether useful to you and that many great, beneficial topics will grace the community through them.
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SEO: Search engine optimization is strange voodoo to most people, and rightly so. Read two different articles about ranking well in Google, and you’re likely to get all sorts of contradictory information. While we strive to ensure that Thesis provides a sound, purposeful optimization built into it for search engines, we have opened this forum so that you can discuss all sorts of search engine topics: What’s the best way to implement a sitemap for Google? How many sites should I ping when I post? Just what is a spider and why is it trying to access my admin panel?
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Third Party: While we have always encouraged you to go to the source for support when it comes to thinks like WordPress itself, we want our forum to be as useful as possible to you, and so we have opened a third party support section for selected products. However, I feel compelled to point out that this is still no guarantee of support, but if you’re not getting the support you need elsewhere, you’re welcome to try us out.
Currently, the only third party products which we are providing forums for are WordPress and OpenHook. If you have a Thesis-related product, such as an add-on style or plugin, that you would like included, please let me know!
If you’ve not been to the board in a while, now’s the time to check it out. Our community is growing up quickly, and with the addition of these new forums, it has become a great deal more useful.
See you on the board!
