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Thesis & WordPress Plugins

Customization via plugins are one of the hallmarks of blogging with WordPress, and plugin compatibility is one of the things to look for when choosing a theme. So what do you need to know about Thesis and plugins?

Plugin Compatibility

While many plugins can be used along with Thesis without any customization of Thesis necessary, Thesis contains specially added code and/or styling to allow these plugins to shine as visually bright as Thesis itself:

Community Contributions

The Thesis message boards contain a wealth of information regarding Thesis, including how to get many plugins to play nicely with it. If you use these plugins, be sure to check out the customization tips on the board or post your own!

  • Brian’s Latest Comments — A drop-in widget for Brian’s Latest Comments for easily adding it to your Thesis sidebar without editing any Thesis sidebar code.
  • CommentLuv — Like the Subscribe to Comments code provided in Thesis, this code for the CommentLuv optimizes its output placement & styling for use within Thesis.

Obsolete Plugins

Due to the features included within Thesis itself, there are certain plugins which will no longer be required upon switching your blog to Thesis. To prevent conflicts and to improve the performance of your blog, it is recommended that you disable these plugins.

  • Any SEO plugin — Thesis has been designed from the ground up to be as optimized as possible for search engines.
  • Separate Comments from Pings (and other plugins which separate TrackBacks & PingBacks from ordinary comments — Thesis already handles this by displaying pings in their own list.

More Plugins

Not every plugin requires extra code to make them work with Thesis. However, some of them can be optimized to better blend in with Thesis, perhaps by setting their options a certain way.

Raven’s Antispam

  • Category: Antispam
  • Tested version: 2.0

While the vast majority of users will never see anything while Raven’s Antispam is in use, users who visit your blog while logged out with JavaScript enabled will see an extra text field to fill out. That text field and label can be made to match Thesis’ default comment fields by entering the following code in the “use own template code” box of the Settings -> Raven’s Antispam panel of your blog’s backend:

<p><input class="text_input" type="text" name="%name%" id="%name%" value="" /><label for="%name%">Please type &ldquo;%answer%&rdquo;</label></p>