Welcome to the first edition of This Week in Thesis, a new weekly* feature here by which we can highlight all the great Thesis-related content our community is creating — reviews of Thesis, tutorials, add-ons, and so on.
Articles are eligible for inclusion if they haven’t been included before — regardless of whether they posted within the “week of” or not — and while I’ll be watching Technorati and Twitter (hashtag: #thesiswp) for relevant content, I’ll no doubt miss plenty.
For that reason, I invite you to share links — whether yours or not — that you feel deserves a mention here with me; you can send me your ideas on Twitter (@KingdomGeek) or via e-mail.
* I’m using the word “weekly” loosely… Some weeks we may see nothing, others we may see a ton.
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Playin’ Hooky: Uncomfortable doing customizations on your own? Afraid of pricking your finger on one of Thesis’ hooks? Don’t fear ‘em, embrace them! Bruce shows you how with three real-life examples of customizing by way of hooks and actions.
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Get the Hook Up: Speaking of real-life examples of hooks & actions, Rae offers up four examples of customizing Thesis with hooks, all wrapped up in a great primer for getting started with Thesis’ hooks & actions, tailored for those new to PHP itself.
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From Head to Foot: Support board superhero Kristarella has published two superb tutorials for creating beautiful headers and out-of-sight footers for your Thesis-powered blog. The proof is in the pudding, as they say, so check out the header and footer area of her site and you’ll want to hear what she has to say.
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Reach Out and Connect w/ Somebody: Google very recently released for public (beta) consumption their new Friend Connect service, which allows webmasters a quick and easy way to build a transparent community around their site; put a face on your visitors, let them befriend each other, and let them discover each other — and your site — from other sites using Friend Connect. We’re all about community here, so I wanted to highlight Don’s quick and painless tutorial on adding Friend Connect to your blog.
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Honorable Mention: Last — and I feel a little guilty linking to this one because, well, it’s mine — is Rick’s release of the Thesis OpenHook plugin. While far from a WYSIWYG interface for modifying Thesis, OpenHook provides easy to use text boxes to add to your site’s design.
That’s all for this round. Did I miss any? Let me know, and we’ll catch ‘em in the next go-around!
{ 21 comments }
I’ve been a little hesitant to mess around with my Thesis styling…but not I have the motivation to start tinkering…thanks
Cheers for the mention.
Don’t feel bad about including yours. It’s a valuable one
Rick, thanks. This is brilliant. I’m just about to dive into hooks and see what they can do.
Whoosh ! Hear that ?
Those were our excuses flying out the window
Thanks for some great link leaks.
Can I just say I am LOVING OpenHook!
Hi,
I just love your free themes, and am wanting to purchase Thesis. I just have one quick question – we use WordPress Direct with our blogs, and I am wondering if Thesis will work with them (are hooks compatible?) – if so, I’m heading over to the purchase link now!
Thanks for all you do, and for the amazing support you offer for your free themes.
Deb
Just want to say that Thesis is the best $$$ I’ve spent on my blog. Ever. I was so impressed that I opted to upgrade to the developer package, even though I didn’t “need” it. I’ve started to customize the themes with hooks & I love the flexibility. Keep up these articles – they’re great for PHP illiterate code hackers like myself.
I agree that linking these kinds of articles is a good idea. For those of us who have limited familiarity with PHP, CSS, etc it is very useful to get step-by-step instructions for customization.
A good theme for one of these weekly updates might be plugins specifically designed for monetizing Thesis/WordPress blogs.
Thanks for the weekly update. SugerRae’s post on Hooks for Dummies is great. I think I might actually be able to do some exciting things with Thesis now.
Thanks, Rick! The weekly update is a great idea.
Great work, Rick!
Thesis is such a brilliant theme… and I nearly missed this very helpful stuff – thank you! I think, like Jeff I am going to upgrade to the Dev version, then I can practice on more than one blog.
Great job! Nice work on the plug-in Rick, works great.
Awesome theme, I will be using it for sure,
Thanks for the hard work!
Hey buddy, any chance on letting us know when this will be compatible with 2.7? Thanks!
Thesis is compatible; you simply have to make one minor addition to the custom_functions.php file.
If, however, you meant “compatible with the boatload of new comments features,” then I’m not for sure when it will be. Could be in the next release or maybe not. I really don’t have any idea what Chris will do.
Thanks for replying. I actually was talking about the admin interface. It’s a bit messy with the new layout.
The fix I linked to will fix the admin panel issue.
Updating my own question – WordPress Direct says Thesis IS compatible. Yay! I’m off to purchase.
Deb
I spent some time talking to the developer at Facebook in charge of the Facebook Connect plugin for Wordpress. It’s an after-hours project and hopefully he’s making some of the changes myself and others have recommended.
When the initial tweaks are done, I’m going to ask him about what it takes to make FB Connect integration with Thesis as easy as possible. Kingdom Geek I’ll be in touch about this. Let me know if it’s ok to put you two in touch.
FYI I think the Myspace/FB/Google connect features should be integrated into a single plugin like ShareThis. I’m reaching out to a few people to make sure this happens.
As someone blogging since 2002 on several platforms, I just wanted to say that Thesis is the first template that makes customizing my blog fun and not a full Saturday afternoon of pain and suffering. If I want to make something happen, it’s minutes instead of hours of research and battling PHP.
Happy holidays to the Thesis team, here’s to a great 2009.
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