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Thesis Theme Exclusive Pre-Launch Special

by Chris Pearson

The pre-launch special is now over, but Thesis is just getting warmed up! Find out how it can improve your Website, or simply…

Get Thesis Now

{ 145 comments… read them below or add one }

Lisa April 25, 2008 at 10:33 am

Kudos to share: Both SimpleMom and I have had our versions of Thesis highlighted on wp-premiums.

Jay Francis Hunter April 25, 2008 at 10:50 am

Very cool!

Congrats Lisa. :)

Bruce Keener April 25, 2008 at 11:06 am

Lisa,
Great job you’ve done. Looks very nice!

Chris Pearson April 25, 2008 at 12:51 pm

Jeff — When you purchased Thesis, you paid with an e-Check. Typically, e-Checks take 3–4 business days to clear, and once that process is complete, you’ll be able to download the theme. You originally paid for the theme on the 18th, so you ought to be able to download it now.

Michael — Welcome aboard! Your story about the stock photography is intriguing, especially considering the notable absence of the Internet at the time… Seems to me that it would be nearly impossible to get your foot in the door in a niche like that unless you knew a slew of designers and photographers up front.

Anyway, thanks for the vote of confidence—there is much awesomeness to come!

Rees — It took me until 3 am last night to get everything figured out, but I was finally able to integrate the forums with the rest of the site. I haven’t announced them yet, but you can head on over to new DIY Themes Forums to take a look around. Your login details ought to transfer from this site over to the forums, so when you visit, you should already be logged in.

Regarding your widgets, whenever you implement a true WordPress widget, it will override the default sidebar. If you’d like to keep some of the default Thesis widgets and use the WordPress widgets, then you’ll need to edit your sidebar file (either sidebar.php or sidebar_2.php) to move the Thesis code outside of the “dynamic sidebar” conditional statement, which looks like this:

if (!function_exists('dynamic_sidebar') || !dynamic_sidebar(1)) :

For instance, if you’d like to keep the Recent Entries widget in the first sidebar but also mix in a few WordPress widgets, you’d simply move the Recent Entries code above the dynamic sidebar conditional in sidebar.php. Your resulting code would then look like this:

<li class="widget">
    <h2>Recent Entries</h2>
    <ul>
<?php
    wp_get_archives('type=postbypost&limit=10&format=html');
?>
    </ul>
</li>
<?php
    if (!function_exists('dynamic_sidebar') || !dynamic_sidebar(1)) :
?>

And yeah, I’ve been busy working on a flexible theme for photoblogs… No ETA yet, but it’s definitely on its way.

Lisa — Congrats to both you and SimpleMom on your unique and noteworthy Thesis implementations! It really is awesome to see you get recognized like this… Keep up the great work!

Jake Summers April 25, 2008 at 3:15 pm

Hi Chris!

I posted this in your video update post and I think this have been more appropriate in this posting.

I would like to know if we are allowed to use your theme for client sites? As other premium themes call it a developers license. And if so what is the price for such a license? I would too use your theme to assist my clients.

Thanks!

Jeff April 25, 2008 at 3:22 pm

Sorry for the trouble Chris, thanks very much for your help. I was able to download the theme. I think the typography is the best I’ve seen online, especially for long content. The white space and design of this theme are really top shelf! Thanks again for the help and good luck with Thesis – I bet a TON of sites will end up using it!

Fausto Ponce April 25, 2008 at 4:15 pm

Hi, Chris: The recomendation you gave Rees about the changing the code of the sidebar.php, is for everyone who uses the worpress widgets or just for the ones who are using the WP Design – Widgets????

Rees Maxwell April 25, 2008 at 6:15 pm

Chris,

Thank you for your detailed answer. I think that’ll be enough for me to hack my way around the widgetization of sidebars.

I’d really love an answer on how to add a custom header image. I have been reading http://codex.wordpress.org/Designing_Headers and I know from what you said that we need to make our additions to the custom.css file so it doesn’t get overwritten when the next update comes along. But I’m still at a loss. How do we affect the style.css “#header” from the custom.css file? Help here would be fantastic! (And sorry for such noob questions.)

And, any chance you’re still going to work on that RTFM guide? Or perhaps you might farm it out to someone? (Lisa and SimpleMom seem to know what they’re doing, AND are quite familiar with your Thesis theme…)

Lisa April 25, 2008 at 6:48 pm

Rees:
Image header tip: Unless you want to add the image as a background image, you don’t add it via the custom.css. If you did (but you don’t!!) it would look like


.custom #header {background-image: url(path-to-the-image);}

If the image bears information (your name or blog name, for example) you don’t want it to be rendered in the background because then it isn’t clickable and there is no “alt” text to be read by search engines or displayed by viewers who have vision impairment or are surfing with images turned off.

The place you would add the image is in the theme’s header.php file, but unless you are familiar with html I would advise against attempting this until you’ve gained more familiarity with both WordPress and HTML and CSS. One way to get this is look at (but don’t edit) the theme design files in the WordPress admin area. Then browse to sites using the theme (including your own) and View Source. If you do this enough you’ll start to get a feel for what code goes where.

My site would be an example of a site where a header image is used instead of text, but because I display my header above the navigation bar (to match my main site), my source code will show various bits in a different order than most other sites using Thesis.

Rees Maxwell April 25, 2008 at 6:56 pm

Lisa,

THANKS! I just poked around your site, looked at what the source looks like [compiled I suppose] and found how you did the header image. I just replicated it at my site (okay, my client’s site).

I don’t know what some of the other stuff is yet, but I made it like the following:

<a href="">

So, it’s a start!

Now that I see where the image occurs, I’m trying to track down how to put it up above the navbar. Ideas? (Gosh, it’d be swell if there was some sort of tutorial that just covered the basics of customization, all in one place. Like: customizing header images, text colors, line colors, background colors/images, etc. I know I’ll eventually figure it out, but if there was a resource you could point me to (or help Chris write) then I’d pester folks here a lot less. :D

Thanks again, Lisa! And your site really looks awesome!

Rees Maxwell April 25, 2008 at 7:00 pm

Heck, that didn’t work. Thought I had the ‘code’ stuff worked out. Well now … too bad there isn’t a ‘preview’ post option here. Sorry for the confusion. I’ll replace the greater-then lesser-than with the # sign just so you get the idea of what it was supposed to say.

Code has been removed.

Update: this was solved in the forums!

Jay Francis Hunter April 25, 2008 at 7:33 pm

I’m willing to give a hand to those in need, I love the thesis theme and I’m pretty handy with HTML and CSS. You can contact me here, until the forums are up and running — I’ll be fairly active there when that happens. :)

Rees Maxwell April 25, 2008 at 7:41 pm

Jay Francis,
Wait no longer: http://diythemes.com/forums/

Looking forward to seeing you there!

Jay Francis Hunter April 25, 2008 at 7:43 pm

Welly well then. I’ll head right over. ;)

Chris Pearson April 25, 2008 at 9:38 pm

Jake — My original plan was to roll out developer pricing this week to accompany the pending price increase on the theme. As these things tend to go, I got tied up this week and wasn’t able to implement anything other than the forums.

Anyway, I’m now hoping to get the new pricing and everything rolled out this weekend, and that will include a developer’s license. I’m not sure what it’ll cost, though… I haven’t decided yet :D

Jeff — Lovin’ the enthusiasm!

Fausto — I’m talking about the standard WordPress widgets that you can edit from your WordPress dashboard (not a plugin). The solution from earlier applies to everyone using standard WordPress widgets.

Chris Pearson April 26, 2008 at 12:16 am

Rees — I’ve still got lots of work to do on the user’s guide. In the meantime, I’ve set up a forum to house Thesis customization tips, so hopefully, you’ll be able to pick up a few pointers from the seasoned Thesis vets out there ;)

Jake Summers April 26, 2008 at 3:39 pm

Thanks for the feedback! Sounds good then. I guess I will just have to be patient and wait for this weekend :-)

Jake Summers April 28, 2008 at 4:37 am

Hi Chris,

I was re-reading your Definitive Guide to Semantic Markup from your Pearsonified site and I see that you said:

You shouldn’t serve sidebar headlines inside high and mighty <h2> tags.

I took a look at the semantic markup for Thesis and noticed the sidebar headlines are h2 (except the ‘Read The Manual’ is h3). Is there a specific reason for this? And do you still recommend serving them in h3 or h4?

Chris Pearson April 28, 2008 at 8:20 am

Jake — You have quite the eye for detail! When I wrote that article one year ago, I was not aware of the fact that you can actually force WordPress to serve widgets with any kind of markup you want. At the time, I was against the use of widgets altogether, simply because I felt like users simply didn’t have enough control over the resulting HTML markup.

Recently, though, I discovered that you can, in fact, manipulate the way WordPress serves sidebar markup—even in auto-generated widgets! Of course, I’m going to integrate this into Thesis 0.4+, and in all likelihood, I’ll choose to serve all sidebar headings inside <h3> tags.

ck April 30, 2008 at 2:00 am

hey chris–

while i run a blog, i’ve been totally new to the actual set up and design part. but now i need to get much better, as it’s all me, so i’m excited to use thesis to help make that happen.

two questions: 1. where can i just find the basic instructions to upgrading my wordpress with your fabulous theme, and not f*ck it up.

2. i have someone designing a new logo for me, but i’m not sure what the dimensions are for the top bar. he tried to pull a few examples from sites, but he said they’re all different, and needs to at least know the maximum area available to design one. help?

thanks!!!

Jake Summers April 30, 2008 at 2:24 am

Okay Awesome! Thanks for the feedback!

Chris Pearson April 30, 2008 at 4:06 pm

ck — Here we go, in order:

  1. Hopefully, these upgrade instructions will help you out until I get a more robust system set up for the theme.
  2. I responded to your header inquiry about header images in Thesis over in the forums.
Denise April 30, 2008 at 4:44 pm

Hi Chris,

Love the new theme, I am in the process of getting this new site up. I’m not an advanced WP user and would like to know the best approach for this.

I am going to use e-junkie to sell an e-book. I don’t want it to be an “in your face” type of sale, my first concern will be with building quality content for readers.

I’m thinking that a “sales page” with a link to e-junkie would be my best bet but I’m not sure. Are you or anyone hear familiar with E-junkie and WP? This is NOT an affiliate link: http://www.e-junkie.com/ej/features.php#fatfreecartpro

My ebook will be promoted in early May and I’ll need to have this functioning by then. In the promotion, I would like to point them to the sales page.

I’d like them to be able to easily maneuver back to the site as well. Thanks so much! (site listed is the other cutline version, new site will be on thesis)

Chris Pearson May 1, 2008 at 8:50 pm

Denise — E-junkie ought to provide you with a hosted sales page URL for your e-book. Once you’ve got that, you can create a page on your site that contains the link to the sales page, and conceivably, you could place that new page in your navigation menu as well.

Alda May 2, 2008 at 7:09 am

Hi, I’ve been searching for weeks for a new template to suit my needs and am so glad I have now found Thesis!! (I love Chris’s themes – I dowloaded and installed Neoclassical a couple of weeks ago, but am finding that it isn’t a perfect fit, hence my ongoing search.)

I am, however, a total novice when it comes to coding and installation and my head hurts from learning so much over the past couple of weeks. What I really want to know now (and this is probably REALLY basic) is how I can install and tweak Thesis without the ongoing changes showing up on my existing site. I’ve got so far as to create a new folder and install WP – I know that I need to install Thesis in that folder, but how do I then go live with it on my existing domain?

Also, while I’m here … I realize the value of the custom.css file, but I have it installed with Neoclassical and really don’t understand how to use it. When I open up the file it just gives me text by way of explanation … is the idea simply to place any changes in that file, to be used later?

Many thanks in advance!

Fred Sakamoto May 2, 2008 at 2:23 pm

Chris,
Noticed in previous post that you were up late figuring out integration issues with your forum. I want to do the same thing with my thesis blog and I also have vbulletin. Again, thanks for your great support. Believe me, I understand how time consuming supporting something like thesis is, if this is something that requires a upgrade fee I don’t mind paying. You are building a really cool community of users.

p.s I posted to your Forum regarding my video question in the blog.

Fred Sakamoto May 2, 2008 at 2:56 pm

Alda,

I was in the same boat! 1) get Filezilla its free 2) once you download thesis you can upload it to your your theme directory which sits under wpcontent, 3) if you don’t know how to do that ask your server people. 4)when you do (1-3) correctly you go to the theme area of the wp control panel and select thesis as your theme. it will then be apparent what theme you are using. Hope this helps. Note: this is not going to come to you all at once if my experience as a new user is any indication. Take it day by day you found the right place.
Fred

Alda May 2, 2008 at 3:10 pm

Hi Fred, thank you for this. Actually I have the process of uploading to the server down pat – it’s how to add the new theme to the blog, do the various configurations, tweaks, etc. without this being visible to my readers at the same time. I’d like to do this in the ‘background’ while still having my site up and intact. Does that make sense?

Fred Sakamoto May 2, 2008 at 3:27 pm

Alda,

What your doing makes sense, guess I could have read your question better. I just got excited to help someone here, because I have got a lot of good ideas from Jay and others. I did run into this plugin.

Jake Summers May 4, 2008 at 5:16 am

Hi Chris,

I purchased the developer’s license and am looking to set up the site. I set up the wp-config file as your directions said, but I am confused as to where I am supposed to download the theme after purchase and wp-config setup? I also emailed you at sales at diythemes dot com a few days ago about this, but I’m not sure if you got it.

Thanks!

Chris Pearson May 4, 2008 at 4:36 pm

Alda — When people tweak a theme for custom use, they often change CSS declarations that control the style of the theme. Customarily, this is done in style.css, but this becomes a huge problem if you wish to upgrade your theme in the future. The solution here is to isolate your own stylistic changes in a separate file—in this case, custom.css.

If you elect to use a custom stylesheet, your custom styles will automatically be loaded whenever a page from your site loads. In that sense, then, custom.css is not for styling changes that you want to save for later; it’s for custom styles that you want to use right now to customize the look of your theme. For instance, if you want to change the color of the default fonts on the theme to purple (ie. hex color #6a1583), you would add the following code to your custom.css file:

.custom body { color: #6a1583; }
Chris Pearson May 4, 2008 at 6:56 pm

Jake — You should be able to access the theme download from here. I haven’t really set up the developers’ part of the site yet, so I completely understand your confusion. Also, just to be specific, you don’t need to do anything special to your WordPress wp-config.php file. Thesis comes with its own config.php file, which only deals with variables that are specific to the theme.

Jake Summers May 5, 2008 at 3:14 am

Awesome! I knew I wasn’t crazy :-)

I have downloaded it now. Thanks!

A Normal Person May 15, 2008 at 8:50 am

it too expensive, half that price and you’d get more than double the sales. Your call though, and wish you luck in the future.

Rees Maxwell May 15, 2008 at 10:35 am

If $87 is “too expensive” then obviously ‘A Normal Person’ is such an awesome, talented and experienced designer that he/she has the ability to knock a complete design out in a couple of hours. A WordPress genius really! So obviously he/she doesn’t need any help from anyone else.

I however am not a top-notch WordPress designer, but rather am learning the trade. So I value my time highly enough that paying Chris P. $87 (less during intro phase) is ridiculously inexpensive to me. And the fact that Chris P. spends time here and in the forums answering questions, … priceless!

But I do look forward to seeing some really incredible themes created by ‘A Normal Person’. And I’m excited that he/she will be constantly improving them and supporting them online and can do all of that for only a few bucks. Can’t wait to see what he/she puts out! Good luck with that!

Alda May 15, 2008 at 10:44 am

Hear hear!

Lisa May 15, 2008 at 11:11 am

Absolutely. Chris’s prices are commensurate with his experience, skill, and the quality of the work. I’m a pro myself, but I’m happy to pay such a paltry sum to learn from a talented colleague and extend my own skill set.

Chris Pearson May 16, 2008 at 12:44 am

Rees, Alda, Lisa — In addition to being my heroes, you are all master wordsmiths as well. Thanks for the support :-D

Rees Maxwell May 16, 2008 at 12:59 am

Right back atcha, Chris! I really appreciate your support here, and on the forums.

Speaking of which, can you do something to get folks to hit the diythemes forums instead of dragging this ‘Pre-Launch’ comment section out? I’d love to see more folks coalesce over there. There are some great Q&As going on in the forums!

Alda May 16, 2008 at 5:27 am

The admiration is very much mutual, Chris. Keep up your excellent work. :)

keith June 22, 2008 at 11:09 pm

Was about to to kick off my official launch when something completely baffling happened. Sidebar 2 (which I set up with a few widgets) is totally blank and the widgets which are assigned to be in sidebar 2 are now at the bottom of Sidebar 1. I have no idea how to fix this. Help?

Chris Pearson June 23, 2008 at 12:07 pm

Keith — Looks like you got it figured out… I think you had simply omitted a closing </div> tag, no?

keith June 23, 2008 at 12:13 pm

Thanks, Chris. I re-installed the original sidebar and sidebar2 php files. When in doubt, re-install, I guess. Thanks for the speedy reply. It was making me crazy. :)

Chris Pearson June 23, 2008 at 12:21 pm

Keith — I definitely know the feeling!

thesis writing August 10, 2009 at 9:54 pm

Extremely long but very useful and informative article. How i wish i can do all of that in a short period of time. But for sure doing those will produce results. I will try to spread your words through my blog and link it back to you. Thanks a lot for those tips.

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