Thesis Version 0.3 Released, Get Your Videos Ready!

{ 93 comments… read them below or add one }

1 Peter Beck 04.13.08 at 12:59 pm

Chris, query from a user of 2 of your older themes:

The image window in the upper R hand of the page: is that assignable to rotate with the most current post? So if the latest post is on, say, beaches, can I assign a beach jpg, to it, but if my next post is on snow, can the image change to the snow jpg I assign to that article?

Ideally, then, when an archived article is brought up, the image showing with it would be the one assigned to it.

Or, is the upper R frame image just a rotation amongst a set of 5 or 9 or whatever?

2 Chris Pearson 04.13.08 at 1:26 pm

Peter — As of version 0.3, the rotating image box is not tied to a particular post, but it certainly should be! I’ll have to release a “patch” soon to allow for that functionality, and then plan to incorporate it into the next major release of the theme.

At this time, the images that appear in the upper right box are a customizable set, and you can include as many images as you like.

3 Bruce Keener 04.13.08 at 1:33 pm

Chris - Thank you for your commitment to excellence and continuous improvement. I love the theme, and love that you continue to improve it. Thanks!

4 Marion 04.13.08 at 1:47 pm

Allowing the right hand image to be connected to a post would be wonderful and really give my blog a totally pulled together look.

As a beginner that has only the bare basics of Word Press down, this is the easiest and nicest looking theme to work with. It makes me so happy to see those 3 little green check marks in the Firefox browser.

My future upgrade wishlist would include:
To have a page template without any sidebars and a really nicely styled print this page option.

Thanks so very much for this wonderful theme. It is just such a pleasure.
Marion

5 Lisa 04.13.08 at 1:57 pm

I’ll echo what the others say above and add that I’m learning so much from this process. I’m very glad I’m one of your early adopters.

6 Colin Scroggins 04.13.08 at 2:21 pm

Chris: My upgrade to .3 went smooth. When you implement the control panel, could you include a custom header and footer block? This would make my upgrade (except for the rotating images) painless. I add Google Analytics code and OpenID forwarding info to my header, and a custom line to my footer. Not having to port these every time would be nice.

I was also wondering whether you would consider adding a basic XML sitemap for the search engines. I know there are plug-ins to handle this, but it seems like an easy add to the template.

7 Graham Cox 04.13.08 at 3:36 pm

Hi Chris,

Re the rotating image area. Can that be used for non-images? I’m considering putting an opt-in form in that space instead. Would that work?

And could I use the rotating functionality to split test different opt-in forms?

I’ll be making the switch from my existing theme to yours shortly so it would be good to know.

Thanks

Graham Cox

8 Chris Pearson 04.13.08 at 4:10 pm

Marion — Both of your suggestions are excellent and will find their way into the theme in some form or another by version 0.4. If you’re so inclined, you can create a “sidebar-less” page template on your own—all you have to do is eliminate the following code from your new page template file:

<?php include (TEMPLATEPATH . '/right_side.php'); ?>

Regarding the printing option, the answer is a print-only stylesheet, print.css. I meant to include it in this release of the theme, but I admittedly got caught up in providing a quick fix for the page navigation issue, which was affecting a large number of users.

Colin — That’s a fantastic idea. Ironically, I was just cursing the theme’s lack of abstracted header/footer support today while I was upgrading Thesis here on DIY Themes. I am focused on ironing out these upgrade and modification wrinkles, and I sincerely appreciate you and other users who feed me real-time updates and suggestions about the theme’s usability.

As far as the XML sitemap goes, the XML Sitemap Generator plugin is an indispensable addition to any WordPress installation. The plugin itself is large and rather intense, so it’s not something I can just casually add on to the theme. I think some things are better left on their own, and the often-updated XML sitemap generator plugin is one of them.

Graham — You can use the rotating image area to display anything you want. In your rotating_images.php file, you’ll notice HTML img references. You can replace each of these references with new HTML – paragraphs (<p>), for instance – and generate any kind of output you like.

Unfortunately, the random image rotator is useless for split testing because of its randomness. There’s no way to extract reliable data from this type of random generation, but if you’re interested in software that can do this sort of thing, I can recommend OpenX from personal experience.

9 Peter Beck 04.13.08 at 5:27 pm

Chris –

I don’t own Thesis, but I’d pick it up in a heartbeat if the R upper corner image could be assigned to the most recent post (if viewing the home page) or a particular image for a particular post (if viewing the specific post, or an archived one). I try to pick an eye-catching graphic for each post, which I wouldn’t want to lose if I switched to Thesis.

What does it do the overall look of the homepage, if a jpeg image is displayed with each post, above the title, say? The overall look of the theme seems to be, imageless titles for posts, with a single upper R image. Was that a purposeful design choice? That R upper (or L upper) area is pretty prime territory for calls to action, like email list sign-ups, etc.

10 Bruce Keener 04.13.08 at 5:35 pm

Chris - A print.css file would be wonderful!

Another wonderful addition would be stylesheets for mobile devices. That might even warrant a separately-priced package, as it sure would be non-trivial. I just disabled the plugin I had been using for iPhone viewing, because it does such a poor job. Has nothing to with Thesis, of course, since it takes over as a theme when it whiffs an iPhone or iPod Touch. It just does a lousy job with the fonts. So, something to think about for down the road.

11 dupatta 04.13.08 at 8:15 pm

Hi Chris

If I get the theme for the first time now will it be the 0.3 release??

12 Chris Pearson 04.13.08 at 8:18 pm

dupatta — Yes, absolutely.

13 Christian 04.13.08 at 9:44 pm

Alright, I installed the new theme upgrade. I saved a copy of the old. Updated my image files and the footer changes I made, and then renamed the theme to thesis again (was thesis 0.3 and that was causing trouble in editing through wordpress)

Now, this is what changed. I now have a sitemap link on my header which I never had before (I did install sitemap and was not able to get a header before). Fine, but would prefer it to be only mentioned in the footer. But the issue is now that the sitemap is empty! I rebuilt it, nothing. What am I doing wrong?

14 Christian 04.13.08 at 9:45 pm

One more thing! I noticed that in my “pages” where I have the page “sitemap”, now the template is default, and there is no option for sitemap anymore…

15 Matt 04.14.08 at 6:28 am

I just love this theme (and it’s finally convinced me to embrace WP and abandon Drupal, Textpattern and MT). One quick question since I’m new to WP as well as Thesis: how do I edit my sidebar items? For example I would like to completely suppress ‘Categories’. Also not sure how to write code to add top nav items (ie what code and in which file).
One more thing, re your ‘Helpful Upgrade Tips’: it took me a few moments to realize we’re supposed to edit the config.php in the new version not the old one (yup, that’s how green I am; there may be others like me out there too…).
Go Chris!

16 Michael 04.14.08 at 7:46 am

I’m thinking it would be nice to have all five of my images rotate automatically–like a slideshow–on each page, instead of one image per page. I tried to do that with Dreamweaver and by playing with some Javascripts for rotating images I found but to no avail. It’s not a high priority for me so I didn’t stick with the problem but it’s worth considering for future releases, I think, because some others might want to do that too.

17 Graham Cox 04.14.08 at 7:56 am

Hi Chris,

Thanks for that…good to know I can put an optin form in the image space as personally I don’t think I’d use it for random images. Really like the fact we can put videos in there too.

From what you say, i t sounds like I could configure that right hand image space to simultaneously display multiple 125×125 banners if I wanted. Is that right?

Also, on the forgeville site and your pearsonified blog you have a couple of nice features that I’d love to see available in Thesis if possible…

i)The ability to place small images for the author’s photo (or image related to the post) on the top right hand side of each blog post (as seen on forgeville).
ii)As seen on your blog, the nice little quote mark graphic.

Just some food for thought anyway. Thanks again for a fantastic theme.

Cheers…Graham

18 Chris Pearson 04.14.08 at 8:04 am

Peter — I think you bring up an extremely valid point, and after taking a look at your site, I realized that if I were using Thesis on Pearsonified, I would need to remove the multimedia box to achieve the proper aesthetic. Like you, I try to use at least one vivid picture with each post, and unfortunately, those pictures clash with the large images (or videos) in the multimedia box.

Because your images are part of your post content, you are tied to keeping those images in the content area of your site (unless you want to manually edit each post… no thanks!). This means that if you were to use Thesis, you’d need a simple option that would allow you to remove the multimedia box, thereby allowing the images within your content area to shine.

Based on this reasoning, I’ve decided to work on a new version of Thesis that provides you with the option to remove the multimedia box altogether. During the course of adding this functionality to the template, I discovered some things that still need tweaking in order to increase the “universality” of the template. That is, there are certain things about Thesis that require tweaking in order to make the theme a best-fit solution for a wider array of bloggers.

Look for this new version (possibly in a beta release) sometime very soon.

Bruce — The mobile.css stylesheet is on the theme’s roadmap, somewhere just beyond the print.css stylesheet. I’m surprised that a plugin even exists for the mobile styles… It seems to me that the structure of a mobile stylesheet would be completely dependent on the HTML for which it is written.

Christian — The answer to both of your questions is that I removed the sitemap.php template file from the theme download. The primary reason for this is that I no longer recommend the use of an XHTML sitemap. Secondarily, the sitemap file itself is poorly constructed and is not optimized for sites with more than 100 posts.

Instead of using a sitemap, I recommend that you learn to distribute your link equity to the best pages of your site. There are a variety of ways you can do this, but one method that I personally prefer is intelligent use of your WordPress categories.

Matt — There are two ways to edit your sidebars. First, by adding widgets to your sidebar, you can override the default sidebar code. If you choose to do this, you’ll be left with only those widgets that you’ve added.

The second way you can edit your sidebar content is by editing the actual sidebar template files themselves. The files in question are sidebar.php and sidebar_2.php, and in order to give you a better idea how this works, let’s look at an example.

You mentioned that you’d like to suppress categories, so that’s what we’ll do. In a default Thesis installation, the categories list is located in sidebar_2.php. Open that file in your favorite text editing or coding software, and then simply delete the following block of code:

<li class="widget">
    <h2>Categories</h2>
    <ul>
<?php wp_list_categories('title_li=0'); ?>
    </ul>
</li>

As far as your navigation menu goes, the items that appear in the menu are dependent on the method that you choose in your config.php file. If you choose to use paged navigation, then your nav links will be automatically populated with all of your WordPress pages. If, however, you’d like to manually edit your navigation, you would need to set the following in your config.php file:

$thesis_use_paged_nav = false;

After doing that, you can open nav_menu_items.php and manually edit the items that appear in your navigation menu.

Finally, thanks for the usability notice on the “Helpful Upgrade Tips.” I’m adding a specification for the new config.php file now.

19 Chris Pearson 04.14.08 at 8:37 am

Christian — One thing I noticed on your site is that you’re applying erroneous CSS classes and inline CSS styles to your <img> declarations. Try removing the style="..." references altogether, and replace the classes with something like this (for the image currently in the top-left position on your latest blog post):

<img class="left frame" … />

This will align your image to the left, wrap the text around it, and add a nice frame around it to set it apart from your content.

20 Daniel 04.15.08 at 2:07 am

This is a great theme! Just a quick question: How do I integrate the Google Custom Search into this theme? I want to use it instead of the WordPress default search.

21 garethjax 04.15.08 at 3:34 am

This theme is wonderful chris I’ve been using copyblogger’s for my own blog, but since i’ve started a side project (linked here) i’ve bought thesis and i’m getting used to it . Kudos!

22 Peter Beck 04.15.08 at 9:16 am

Chris –

A big part of Thesis’ charm IS that image on the upper R side; it may nice to have an option to remove it for image-in-each-post aesthetics, since its elegance stands on its own, but that pic on the R is an eye catcher.

If you can somehow rig it so that the image one would normally put at the top of one’s post could be put into an image folder, with a tag of some kind for that particular article, and displayed in the R-sided window if the post is at the top of the queue on the home page, or being displayed as the solo post by itself, that would be awesome.

23 Daniel 04.15.08 at 10:34 am

Two features I’d love to see: 1) Submenus to display pages under the nav_menu_items.php 2) Rotating videos. If Chris or anybody else has suggestions for how to make this happen, I’d love to hear it. I’m playing with the code and I’ll let you know if I come up with anything. Thanks!

24 Lisa 04.15.08 at 11:51 am

Daniel — You may know this, but submenus generally require a Java$cript solution to show and hide the menu on mouseover. It’s definitely hackable, but I think it would be difficult for Chris to implement in an automated way, and certainly a headache to support.

If you wanted the submenu items to persist, then that would just be a question of adding in a new ul list (and some custom style rules to differentiate it from the main nav) into the nav_menu.php.

25 Chris Pearson 04.15.08 at 4:00 pm

Daniel — Thesis actually comes with default styles that are meant to accommodate an almost drag-and-drop implementation of a Google Custom Search Engine. Unfortunately, I just tested the code per Thesis 0.3, and I found out that some additional CSS declarations were required for seamless integration. Here’s what you need to do to get it working properly.

First, you’ll need to open up style.css and locate line 310, which should read:

li#google_cse form input[type="text"] { text-align: left; }

Add the following highlighted CSS declarations to that line, like so:

li#google_cse form input[type="text"] { width: 14.69231em; padding: 0.30769em; border-width: 0.07692em; text-align: left; }

Once you’ve done that, you should open up the appropriate sidebar file where you’d like to place your Google CSE, and then insert your CSE code like so:

<li id="google_cse" class="widget">
    <h3>Google Custom Search</h3>
    <!‐‐ insert Google CSE code here ‐‐>
</li>

Hopefully, that’ll do it! I’ll have that fixed by the next release—I simply overlooked it in this one.

26 Chris Pearson 04.15.08 at 4:40 pm

Peter — I think the route I’m going to take here involves the use of custom fields. This way, if you include an img reference in the appropriate custom field, it will show up in the multimedia box. Otherwise, if the custom field is empty, then the multimedia box area will revert to your active setting. Right now, the planned “active settings” are rotating images, video, and no box at all.

27 Robert Simplicio 04.15.08 at 6:05 pm

Hi Chris, I think I found a bug in the theme, but I’m not sure, being a greenhorn to WordPress and the theme. It appears differently in IE7 and Firefox 2.0.0.13

What happens is, if a user posts a long URL or string of text in the comment box, it overflows outside the comment area and over into the sidebars. I used a normal Amazon URL since I know they are notoriously long, as I was testing the Recent Comments plug-in I had just installed.

Here it is.

Also, I have had some issues with other plug-ins and their look in the theme, specifically the Subscribe to Comments plug-in, on the Manage Subscriptions page. The text seems awefully small. Any advice on how to enter the settings for this so that the correct div tags are around the main portion of the form and how to get it to display the second sidebar would be greatly appreciated.

28 Robert Simplicio 04.15.08 at 6:09 pm

Also, I’m using the DualFeeds plug-in and could use some help in either suppressing the subscribe link in the upper right of the page, or replacing it with the image from DualFeeds, or at least your view on this.

Thanks again!

29 Daniel 04.16.08 at 7:20 am

Thanks Lisa. My dream is a submenu that only appears when I am on the parent page for those pages and then disappears otherwise. I don’t know javascript, but I’ll look around and see what code I cut and paste. Thanks again.

30 Chris Pearson 04.16.08 at 12:06 pm

Robert — The behavior you’ve described is perfectly normal. Generally speaking, it is considered poor practice to post lengthy, ambiguous URLs like the link in your example. The solution here is simply to use anchor tags (<a>) to encode your URLs instead of posting the raw URLs outright.

Regarding the Subscribe to Comments plugin, the problem you’ve described exists within the plugin’s options page. The code behind that page is strictly the product of the plugin itself, so Thesis has nothing to do with the way that page is presented.

To fix your problem, though, I’d recommend making sure you’ve upgraded to WordPress 2.5 and the latest version of that plugin. The author of the Subscribe to Comments plugin is an excellent WordPress developer, and I know he generally takes care of usability issues like that.

Finally, I’m not sure I understand the issue with your feeds. The feed URL that displays in the status bar when I mouse over your “subscribe” link appears to be the right one, so I’m assuming you’re at least linking to the correct feed. As far as the icon goes, the RSS icon has become the widely-adopted standard—especially since it was integrated into the Firefox 2.0+ address bar. On that basis alone, I would say that the current RSS icon graphic is far more universally recognizable than the DualFeeds graphic. The goal of any icon is to convey specific information accurately, and I believe the RSS icon stands a better chance of doing that here.

31 Ironman 04.16.08 at 1:42 pm

Anyone have a working demo of a video header? I’d love to see this feature in action!

32 Robert Simplicio 04.16.08 at 1:47 pm

Chris– Thank you for the feedback and I will use your suggestions and work things out. I’ll let you know if I have any further issues.

Thanks!

33 George Donnelly 04.16.08 at 6:42 pm

You’ve got a happy customer here. I look forward to future iterations and will be interested in purchasing more themes in the future from you. Your work is really top-notch.

34 ShaneR 04.16.08 at 9:14 pm

Concerning the discussion around the media box….

If a site’s posts contain images (say, a photoblog), and we didn’t want a rotating image in the multimedia box as a result, what would everyone’s opinion be on using that space for a site logo? Would it work (look good)?

It seems to me that you could simply have one image that is your logo, and let the site rotate that..er..one image. or just take out the code that rotates the images.

I was playing around with that thought before I read all the above…

35 syed 04.17.08 at 9:38 am

This theme is solid gold. I have been using it for quite some time and i must say, I am really hooked. I really like the simplicity and note how i change the rotating picture to random quotes.

36 syed 04.17.08 at 9:55 am

Thanks for the note Chris. Noted.

37 garethjax 04.18.08 at 2:21 am

Hi, just a little advice: if you install the “wp-cache” plugin for wordpress, you will notice that the sidebar are not updated when you save your widgets. This is because wp-cache is caching the sidebar files: my advice is to empty the cache when you update the sidebars.

38 Marion 04.18.08 at 9:14 am

If the rotating image can be matched to the category, can FeedBurner be set up to also add the same matched image to the feed? Is there a way to play with FeedBurner’s style sheet?
Marion

39 Rich 04.18.08 at 1:58 pm

I am new to blogging and just now creating three websites for Marketing, Real Estate and Medical (all my companies). I have seen copyblogger and Ron Shefren and Jeff Walker’s blogs. I am impressed with all of them. What I was wondering is which one of your sites should I purchase (i.e., the copyblogger theme or the new thesis theme)? Why one over the other.

40 Richard 04.18.08 at 5:43 pm

Greetings Chris

Great theme. I’m keen to purchase but would like to know what your license terms are please. In particular, is the license limited to a single site use of the theme or multiple sites? And does it matter whether there is a commercial element for subsequent sites?

Many thanks
Richard

41 bhatnaturally 04.19.08 at 12:24 am

hi I just bought the 0.3 version. How do I (a) add videos in place of the rotating images? (b) if I want to add custom images in the rotating images area what dimensions should they be?

42 garethjax 04.19.08 at 4:35 am

Just a thought: it could be really nice if there was a plugin that allow us to add snippets of html code, styled for thesis, directly into the editor

43 Bob Sherman 04.19.08 at 5:15 pm

Chris,
Let me know if you change the Neoclassical theme to a purchase with support. I don’t mind paying you for your excellent work.I really don’t want to change themes though.

44 Dan 04.20.08 at 9:35 am

H’lo Chris!

I am pretty new to the web in general and to wordpress specifically. When I decided to blog, design and readability seemed of paramount importance. I am so glad that a little poking around got me to pearsonified.

I liked thesis the best although I agree that the rotating pics, as nice as they are, are likely to clash with the images I am going to put in the various articles. So, I look forward to the option of converting that area to other uses. For now, I will probably take all the images out save one that will align with the overall scheme I have for the site.

Could you tell me how to place a header image in the banner area for my site? Where it currently states in type, “Mr. Ooh Where the best of Ooh! meets the best of You”?

Being new, I am not sure whether I should first look amongst wordpress documentation for answers to my questions or come to you. (This in regards to various revisions I intend for my site.) I thought I would try the easiest way and just ask you!

Is there a forum or tutorials coming? Or, if simple layout changes are part of basic wordpress documentation, can you advise on the most laymen-friendly resources?

Thanks so much!

45 Chris Pearson 04.21.08 at 8:32 am

Marion — As far as I know, there is no way to provide conditional code within the feed. Further, since the rotating images are not yet part of the post content, there’s simply no way I could pull them into the feed.

Rich — Thesis is the newest of all those frameworks, and as a result, it is also the most refined. On top of that, I provide ongoing support to the Thesis community, and for many people, that makes all the difference.

Richard — If you get a developer’s license, you can use Thesis on as many sites as you like, but you cannot sell Thesis or any modifications of it as independent entities. For example, if you’re doing design work for a client, you can use the theme on their site. However, if you’re simply tinkering with the theme and making modifications to it, you cannot sell the theme or those modifications as standalone products.

I’m not sure what you mean by “commercial element,” but as long as those subsequent sites aren’t selling Thesis or any modifications thereof, then you’ll be well within the range of the license.

garethjax — I’ve thought about something like that, and unfortunately, I can’t commit my own development resources to a solution anytime soon. I can, however, point you in the direction I was looking.

Basically, the process is called syntax highlighting, and I think if you dig deep enough, you may find a WordPress plugin that can help you out. When I was seriously looking over this stuff earlier this year, I concluded that if I wanted my syntax highlighted properly, I was going to have to do a fair amount of customization (involving regex, too… yeeesh!).

Bob — I will probably end up doing just that. Thank you for the vote of confidence!

Dan — I should probably code in an option that allows people to replace the header content with an image, but for now, a tutorial will have to do. Because a lot of users will likely be interested in modifying their headers, I think it makes sense to add a tutorial on this to the Thesis user’s guide. The tutorial is somewhat technical, though, so it may take me a couple of days to complete it.

I should have the forums up by the end of the week, so hopefully, you’ll find more value and support there in the future!

46 Bruce Keener 04.21.08 at 11:17 am

I just want to echo that Chris has provided not only a great design with Thesis, but also an excellent platform.

For example, with some relatively simple additions, I can have random images for all my posts and fixed images for a couple of selected pages. To illustrate, I added the following code to the top of the rotating_images.php file:


<?php if ( is_page('my-music') ) : ?>    <img src="<?php bloginfo('template_url'); ?>/headers/gretsch.jpg" alt="gretsch" /><?php elseif ( is_page('free-ebook-download') ) : ?>    <img src="<?php bloginfo('template_url'); ?>/headers/book_page.png" class="three_by_two" alt="free ebook" /><?php else : ?>


and added the following to the bottom of the file

<?php endif ?>


and now have fixed images on my music and ebook pages.

I love being able to do this, but am even more excited about continuing to learn from Chris’ tutorials on how to take advantage of the design and platform.

Thanks again Chris!

47 Paul S Usowicz 04.22.08 at 5:40 pm

Hi, I have a very minor niggle - I want to use the theme with a static home page. I have created a home and blog page then gone to settings/reading and selected the Front Page Displays a static page selecting my two pages. However, the automatic menu displays two home items and the selection gets a little confused.

I’m running WP 2.5 and Thesis 0.3. Great theme too and well worth the money.

48 Chris Pearson 04.22.08 at 5:52 pm

Bruce — Thanks very much for the kind words!

Paul — You’ve uncovered a “bug” in the theme that only appears when you’re using a static homepage. I’ll have to cook up a fix for the next version; in the meantime, you’ll have to use the manually updated navigation menu instead of the auto-generated one.

Sorry for the inconvenience!

49 Paul S Usowicz 04.22.08 at 5:54 pm

No problem. Thanks for the quick reply.

50 Peter Beck 04.22.08 at 6:28 pm

Chris –

Do you have any plans to release a kind of “front page” theme or product? By that I mean something like a semi-static website page, with subsections that link to other standard pages (like what the Revolution theme does, for online news magazines).

There’s definitely a niche for a thematically consistent landing page type site, with similar customizing functionality to your themes, for businesses needing to update visitors about multiple goings-on.

51 Jake Summers 04.23.08 at 3:51 am

Hi Chris!

Sorry if this post was placed twice, I am not sure if I did the first one.

Anyhow, I absolutely love your theme and was wondering what the licensing rules are for it? Basically 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 I guess.

Thanks!

p.s. This is my first time posting on any of your sites and I just wanted to say that your article on semantic web markup pretty much kickstarted my obsession with blogging!

52 Rees Maxwell 04.23.08 at 10:46 pm

Hey Chris, really awesome work here. As I dig into the various files, I see how much work has gone into this, and am impressed, and thankful that it is YOU and not me.

I am a WP noob. I hacked it into a RapidWeaver themed site a month ago, and am back to WP, now wanting to run an entire site with WP. So, I have a couple of questions:

* As mentioned previously, how do you add a header image? (Wow, total noob question … yet I just don’t see how. You mention using the custom.css file for customizations, but looking in the styles, and the header.css … I can’t figure it out.)
* How to add pages? I want a Contact page (for example). You say, “If you’d like your navigation menu to consist of your WordPress pages, set the $thesis_use_paged_nav variable to TRUE” … but by default I see an About page linked to on the home page, but no “about.php” page… and I don’t get how to add WordPress pages.

Hmm, I’ll go over to wordpress.com/org to figure out how to add WP pages. However, these would be good things for your tutorial. When writing it, just think, ‘Some of these folks are complete noobs.’

53 Rees Maxwell 04.24.08 at 4:28 am

Okay, so I learned something.

To add a page, it is as simple as going to Write - Page. Then add the page title, and whatever you want in the body of it.

Another note: If you still want to leave your $thesis_use_paged_nav variable set to TRUE, but don’t like the order the pages are in … just use the WP Advanced options (in Write - Page, or Manage - Pages). You’ll find the last option of ‘Page Order.’ Just set the number of each page in the sequence you want. And if you don’t want to mess around with reordering all of those numbers later upon needing to add a new page between two others … just number them by tens. (10, 20, 30, …etc.) A trick from my youth, programming BASIC, or Pascal or Fortran or one of those times.

54 Filipe 04.24.08 at 8:16 am

1. Is there code that I can add to custom.css to switch the page layout? (I would like to see what it would look like with the siderbars (including the headers) on the left and the posts on the right.

2. Has anyone made a video header? I haven’t seen any. I would like to know how to do it as I didn’t see any option. Chris?

3. Where could I learn about using the custom file. I want to start using it since Thesis is a work in progress. I just don’t understand how it works. Any links or explanation would help.

55 garethjax 04.24.08 at 8:24 am

I’d love to do a video on the right box, to supplement a specific post

56 Fred Sakamoto 04.24.08 at 11:45 pm

Chris,

Just bought thesis. Thank you, am totally new to WP. Using 2.5, and have upload thesis. It seems to be working. My friend uses Neo Classical, I do not know if I should also went with Neo Classical and customized it. So maybe I am in the wrong place, but I wanted to support what your doing so I bought in. 4 quick questions.

Q1: I want did not see the “Heading 3” from the drop down formating menu. Nor did I see the auto word rap. Under writing post, I selected HTML so does that mean I have to cut and paste your code to make drop caps or did I do something wrong?

Q2: I wanted to shrink the size of the video box to a vertical rectangle one column wide. Is that possible?

Q3: I would like to have a 2 column wide static text box under my header. Can I do that?

Q4: I wanted to download suckerfish drop down menu plugin and wanted to know if that would cause problems?

http://ryanhellyer.net/dropdowns/

thanks

fred

57 Premium WP Theme News Links | WP-Premiums 04.25.08 at 3:54 pm

[...] Pearson’s Thesis Theme has been upgraded to version 0.3., which provides some useful extra features such as a dynamically generated navigation menu, the [...]

58 Chris Pearson 04.26.08 at 4:03 pm

Peter — I have a rough-yet-functional development version of a theme whose primary components are static pages. The idea was that it would be better suited for business sites where the blog is not a priority. The thinking behind this is that even without a well-updated blog, a site based on a solid framework stands a great chance of ranking well over time. Further, because it’s based on WordPress, the site would also be easy to maintain.

Anyway, I realize this is not quite the style you’re talking about, but I’ll probably release that framework before focusing on a “magazine” style, which requires a lot of additional, precise page management from users.

Jake — I haven’t rolled out developer pricing yet, but I plan to do so to accompany this weekend’s pending price increase on the theme. Stay tuned.

Awesome about the semantic markup article… There is much to obsess about on the topic!

Rees — Your inquiry about custom header images was addressed over in the DIY Themes forums, and I see that you knocked out the page thing as well… Nicely done!

Filipe — I’ll try to answer your questions in order:

1. Not at this time, no. You could, however, experiment with calling right_side.php before opening <div class="content_box"> in index.php.
2. I will put up an example in the next couple of days. If someone wants to chime in with an example before then, drop a comment and let us all take a look. Also, now that I think about it, you can browse through this Technorati page to see if anyone has a video box on their site. User Jay Thompson has integrated a Google map.
3. Check out how to set up your configuration file in the user’s guide.

59 Seth 04.26.08 at 5:10 pm

Hey Chris,
Can’t get past the first step…
Changing the config.php file to my feedburner details does nothing to my SUBSCRIBE link.
I’ve checked and quadruple checked.
Nothing.

60 Chris Pearson 04.26.08 at 9:47 pm

Seth — Are you attempting to edit your config.php file from within the WordPress dashboard? If so, it’s likely that the permissions on your /wp-content folder won’t allow for file editing.

You should try editing config.php with a text editor, and then upload the modified file to your server with an FTP client.

61 Seth 04.27.08 at 9:34 am

I mean I’m staring at the code. I download via filezilla into a text editor then back up. The code is changed to my feedburner address. Any other suggestions? Thanks

62 Marion 04.27.08 at 10:00 am

Hi Seth,
I had problems also with the feedburner feed until I took out the double quotes and put in the single quotes. Also the semi-colon needs to be there.
It looks like this in the config.php:

$thesis_feed_url = 'http://feeds.feedburner.com/SweetPeasAndPurls';

I hope this helps.
Marion

PS. Right now, I just can’t upload my logo using the forum instructions.

63 Jay Thompson 04.27.08 at 2:54 pm

There are not enough superlatives in the lexicon to describe this theme. It is SMOKIN’ HOT!

I implemented Suckerfish menus as my application really needed drop downs. Still some style tweaking to do, but it works fine.

Have an interactive home search based on Google maps as the “rotating images”. May switch over to static images just due to speed concerns (that’s a problem with my real estate search site, NOT Thesis).

Put me down as one wanting to be able to tie a specific image/whatever to a specific page/post rather than random rotate. For what I’m doing, it would be ideal for example to have the Tempe, AZ search map always come up on the Tempe page/posts.

What would be *really* wicked is if I could have one set of rotating images for one page, and another set for another page. Then I could have Tempe pics random on the Tempe page and Scottsdale pics random on the Scottsdale page.

Fabulous work Chris!

64 Chris Pearson 04.27.08 at 3:40 pm

Seth — When you download the config.php file via Filezilla, are your variables already changed, or do you have to input your feed URL again? If the latter condition is true, then your config.php file is not saving properly.

The reason I ask is becase when I check the HTML source of your site, it’s clear that the $thesis_feed_url value is still pointing to the WordPress default feed. Make sure that you aren’t declaring the value of $thesis_feed_url in line 4 of config.php, and then overwriting it in line 5.

Jay — I’ve been keeping up with your mods, and I am really enjoying seeing the creative and different ways you’re using the available space in the layout.

Also, I’m loving your ideas and input about the multimedia space. If you really think about it, categorical control of this area would be a powerful tool for anyone in any niche.

For instance, if I were to do something like this on Pearsonified, I could use the space to display a picture and description of Thesis on every post I have that is in the “WordPress Themes” category. Achieving that kind of focus and and control in a dynamic environment is seriously powerful stuff—definitely keep an eye out for this in version 0.4.

Oh, and to answer your final question, which was:

What would be *really* wicked is if I could have one set of rotating images for one page, and another set for another page.

… Yes, that is totally doable as well, and I’m going to offer it as a pluggable function in an upcoming release. This will be one of many functions that I hope to place into a function repository—a collection of plug-and-play items that you can add to your Thesis install to do just about anything you want!

65 Jay Thompson 04.27.08 at 4:13 pm

“Yes, that is totally doable as well, and I’m going to offer it as a pluggable function in an upcoming release. This will be one of many functions that I hope to place into a function repository—a collection of plug-and-play items that you can add to your Thesis install to do just about anything you want!”

I think I just died and went to Wordpress heaven.

Thanks Chris!

66 Chris Pearson 04.27.08 at 4:19 pm

Jay — If your current site is any indication, you’ll be the function-writingest person I know once you see how it’s done

67 Chris Pearson 04.27.08 at 6:14 pm

Filipe — Here’s a killer implementation of a video header.

68 Seth 04.27.08 at 8:04 pm

Chris,

The fact that you’ve produced such far-reaching quality stuff, yet still sit here helping smucks like me, well… You’ve got a customer for life.

Turns out I had both versions of Thesis in my templates folder. That was causing my problems. It took 5 seconds to fix in the end.

Marion,

I find it exceedingly rare that someone reaches out to help like that. And with such a good tip, too. Many thanks.

69 Claude 04.27.08 at 9:17 pm

Chris,

Is the version number hardcoded in any particular file?

I have uploaded what I thought was version 0.1 as well as the new 0.3 version to my themes folder as /thesis-v01 and /thesis-v03, but regardless of which theme I load they both say “Thesis 0.1 by Chris Pearson.”

Thanks,
Claude

70 Chris Pearson 04.27.08 at 9:23 pm

Seth — Awesome, man… Glad you got it working! Good luck with your site (and especially your goals) as well.

Claude — Check your style.css file, where you’ll find the version number on line 5. My v03 here says 0.3 for the version number, so hopefully, your file will match up!

71 Dan Locke 04.27.08 at 10:15 pm

Dear Chris,

Here is a little Techsmith/Screencast video that illustrates my question. Hope you can assist.

Dan

72 phil 04.27.08 at 10:24 pm

Thesis is absolutely incredible. I’m anxious for each and every update. It feels like [insert favorite holiday here] with every update.

1. Can the width of the note and alert classes be modified? If so, how?
2. How can I get these classes to work in the sidebar. Like you done in blue on sidebar 1 above.

Chris, you’re awesome. I have been the type of person to never pay for things you can get on the internet. When you released Thesis, I didn’t hesitate for 1 nano second. Your business strategy/plan is working well. Keep up the great work.

73 Chris Pearson 04.28.08 at 8:53 am

garethjax — This is must-have functionality… Look for it in the next release!

Fred — I’ll try to answer your questions in order:

1. The “Heading” dropdown menu only appears in the WYSIWYG post-editing interface; you were working in the HTML editor, so that option wasn’t visible to you at the time. You could always switch to the visual editor to format a particular bit of text as “Heading 3,” or you can simply wrap the appropriate text inside <h3> tags from within the HTML editor—either way will get the job done.
2. Yes, you could conceivably shrink the video box to only fit in one column, but it would require a fairly significant amount of code reorganization in right_side.php, either sidebar.php or sidebar_2.php, and likely custom.css. This type of modification is perfect for discussion over in the forums.
3. Static text box under your header? Hmm, do you mean that you’d also like to have a two-column layout in addition to the default 3-column layout?
4. You can use the suckerfish dropdowns plugin with the theme—Jay is rocking it on his site right now (with the header navigation links).

74 Simple Mom 04.28.08 at 10:53 am

Hey Chris - I posted this on the forums today, but my posts aren’t showing up (I’m there as ‘toblerone.’)

I uploaded 0.3 today, and everything went smoothly except that new changes in my right_side.php aren’t showing up. It pretty much looks like it did before I updated. Any thoughts?

75 Chris Pearson 04.28.08 at 10:54 am

Simple Mom — For some reason, the forum is only serving cached versions of each thread. In order to see updates, you’ll have to hit refresh on each forum page.

I’m working on getting this issue resolved today… Sorry for the inconvenience in the meantime!

76 Simple Mom 04.28.08 at 12:16 pm

No problem. I actually figured out my issue, so that’s okay! Thanks for all you’re doing.

77 Fred Sakamoto 04.30.08 at 2:00 am

Chris,

Thanks for your reply. Q1) The “Heading” drop down menu only appears in the WYSIWYG post-editing interface; you were working in the HTML editor, so that option wasn’t visible to you at the time. True.

To clarify I was in the WYSIWYG post-editing interface, I did not realize that you had to toggle the kitchen sink button to see your drop down format options. (v 2.5 )Might want to add to your user docs for beginners like me.

Q2) Ok I will put what I am thinking on the forum

Q3) Chris’s response Static text box under your header? Hmm, do you mean that you’d also like to have a two-column layout in addition to the default 3-column layout?

Answer: Yes to have booth would greatly improve flexibility. I think it would be great to able to float with defined areas between booth. Just as you have your “Read your Manual” box that is fixed I would like to be able to place fixed static boxes on every page. Not the same place as your “Read your Manual” box appears to be.

Q4) Got it. I will try to figure out how to do this.

78 Austin 04.30.08 at 9:19 am

Great job Chris,
I just have a question for you or who anyone wants to answer it.
What web languages do I need to learn to create blogs like thesis and pro blogger and neoclassical, because I want to start creating some blogs but I don’t want to buy the wrong books?

79 Chris Pearson 04.30.08 at 10:17 am

Fred — Loving the suggestions. The next release of Thesis will contain a more scalable platform for adding things like static boxes, showing/hiding the multimedia box area, etc. Simply put, it will be more flexible, and you’ll have more freedom with your design.

Austin — Fundamentally, you’ll need to have a firm grasp of HTML and CSS before embarking on building a theme. Here are two books that I wholeheartedly recommend as learning tools:

• Stylin’ with CSS: A Designer’s Guide (Wyke-Smith, 2^nd ed.)
• Bulletproof Web Design: Improving flexibility and protecting against worst-case scenarios with XHTML and CSS (Cederholm, 2^nd ed.)

Also, if you really want to produce quality designs, you’ll need to keep an eye on the usability of what you produce. Personally, I recommend Don’t Make Me Think, a fantastic “thinker’s guide” to Web usability by Steve Krug.

80 Nick 04.30.08 at 7:56 pm

Instead of going through all that work creating websites.
Could I make just as much money buying some and making them larger?or what languages should I learn to create sites like user interfaced and cool programs on the web?

81 Erik 05.01.08 at 2:26 pm

I thought I read that the main body post width was 480px, but when I insert images into the body content at that width, they expand further than the intended space. This only seems to happen in Safari. Any ideas? [example]

82 Chris Pearson 05.01.08 at 3:04 pm

Erik — In your example picture, the size of the fonts in the post has been reduced to a size that is substantially smaller than the default. My guess is that the font-size of your body element was modified in some way, because this would, in fact, affect the size of the resulting layout. Keep in mind that Thesis’ sizing is entirely based on ems, so font-size editing is something that should take place only on a node level (and not at the root).

Further, if you are interested in changing the size of the fonts in your content area, try creating a set of .custom declarations for the .format_text classes that you’ll find in style.css. And I guess on that note, I ought to release sets of custom.css definitions that can give people larger or smaller font packages on the fly. I’ll see what I can do about that

83 Fred Sakamoto 05.01.08 at 7:14 pm

Chris,

Hey I got the sucker fish menu to work thanks to Jay. I tried to edit my header file though and I could not get it right. When I tried it stripped all the codes for the page? Can you tell me what to comment out?
below is my page.

http://www.knowme.net
You

84 Chris Pearson 05.01.08 at 9:18 pm

Fred — I can’t tell what’s going on from the look of your page… Just to make sure I’m understanding you here—you’re trying to install suckerfish on a non-Thesis page, correct?

If so, you can likely get some help over in the forums. As things are now, I cannot provide consulting for non-Thesis HTML issues. Good luck!

85 Jay Thompson 05.01.08 at 10:05 pm

Chris - it looks like Fred posted the wrong link. He’s got a Thesis blog up at: http://www3.knowme.net

Fred - I think you need to go to the Thesis config.php file and set the $thesis_use_paged_nav variable to FALSE. Then put the php call to Suckerfish in the file nav_menu_items.php.

That should turn off the default menu, and leave your Suckerfish menu intact.

86 Fred Sakamoto 05.02.08 at 1:17 am

Jay,

thanks again! Your the best. I wanted to place my menu bar under the H1 Title. It seems to have worked which is different from what you did a little bit. (1)Now my Thesis config.php file is set $thesis_use_paged_nav variable to FALSE. (2) Then put the php call to Suckerfish in my header file. (3) I deleted the contents of file nav_menu_items.php.

Chris, at this point I have deviated a little from what jay has done.

I would like to do remove the home, lines, and bring down the feedburner to sit on top of my menu in the same position. This will free up about a 1/2 inch of space so that I can move the h1 title higher on the page. I would also like to move the search code into the empty space to the right of my h1 title, sitting just above my menu bar.

87 Erik 05.02.08 at 11:17 am

Thanks Chris, I figured it out. My default settings in Safari on my Macbook Pro were different from my default font settings in firefox.

88 Chris Pearson 05.04.08 at 6:58 pm

Jay — Thanks, bro… Excellent catch there.

Erik — Excellent, I’m glad you figured it out!

89 Jason 06.11.08 at 2:49 pm

Pre-purchase question: Could you elaborate on why the SEO of thesis is the strongest? I was browsing the user forums and looking at example thesis-based sites and noticed most were not displaying well in Google. For instance, every result for thehatchet dot net only shows the navigation categories under the page title. Same issue with www3.knowme dot net. Is this user error?

90 Chris Pearson 06.11.08 at 4:01 pm

Jason — Your sample points out two sites out of over 300… On top of that, if Google sees an exact, uncontested domain match for a particular term, it will return a nested list of additional results for the matching site. For example, if you search for Pearsonified, you’ll see the primary result with the cool list of high-ranking internal pages. The only reason you see such a nice result, though, is because there is no competitive result for the term Pearsonified and because Pearsonified is an exact, uncontested domain match for the query term.

The two sites you’ve mentioned don’t meet this criteria—in fact, they’re not even close. Your first example, The Hatchet, is not only a new site on a .net domain, but it is also a hugely contested term (against the likes of Wikipedia and a well-known novel)! Your second example, KnowMe, does not have Thesis installed at the root, and therefore, the theme cannot affect the site’s indexing at this level. If this were an experiment, we’d have to throw out this result completely.

As far as the theme’s SEO goes, Thesis consists of minimal HTML served up in sensible, semantically-meaningful fashion, a la this article. Naturally, post content is served before sidebar content, and Google et. al. respond favorably to sites that are coded up in this manner.

91 drdx 06.18.08 at 9:45 pm

hello there this is the koolest wordpress theme i’ve ever seen.. excuse me for my english.. please try to understand

is it possible to use your theme on wordpressMU site? I would definitely get the developers license if you would allow to use on wpMu as a default templates, or do you have any plan to create a theme just like this [thesis theme] for wordpressMU? Hope you reply to my email.. thank you so much you did a great job, very beautiful theme..

92 Chris Pearson 06.19.08 at 12:15 pm

drdx — Thesis will work on WordPressMU installations, but I have not tested it extensively in that environment. I would love to have someone like you use Thesis with MU, and then perhaps you could give me feedback about things that need to be added for a better Thesis+MU experience.

93 drdx 06.23.08 at 9:55 pm

thanks Chris.. im sorry due to my busy schedule sometime next month I’ll get the license and try it on wordpressMU sure I will give you feedback… keep it up your theme is the best looking theme, second to none when it comes to simplicity and beautifullity…

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