Thesis Version 0.3 Released, Get Your Videos Ready!

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.

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.

dupatta — Yes, absolutely.

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.

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.

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.

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!