This article is deprecated! Any technical information refers to software versions that are now obsolete. Please visit the DIYthemes Blog for current updates, or check out the old Thesis Blog for a treasure trove of website marketing insights.
As of version 1.3, Thesis is capable of producing nearly every useful, basic HTML markup structure. This has massive implications, simply because it is now possible to recreate almost any design by using a deft combination of custom styles (custom.css), images, and functions (custom_functions.php). Just last week, I demonstrated this amazing flexibility by adapting the award-winning Pearsonified design to the Thesis framework.
That’s compelling stuff, but how does it relate to Cosmo? Well, for starters, I’m sure that many of you (perhaps all of you!) assumed that Cosmo was going to be a completely different theme from Thesis—a magazine-style theme, if you will. Originally, I shared this same assumption, but in the last few weeks, I’ve realized that Cosmo cannot justifiably be released as a separate theme.
On a functional level, Cosmo only does one thing differently than Thesis. It allows you to control the display of your home page rather than being tied to the reverse-chronological list of recent posts that typifies most blogs. Outside of this home page control, however, Cosmo’s functionality would literally be identical to that of Thesis.
When you think about Cosmo in this manner, you quickly realize that the only sensible solution here is to build home page control into Thesis. I’m not going to reinvent the wheel here; I’m just going to make the wheel better.
I know you’ve all been waiting patiently for Cosmo to be released, and on that note, you’ll be happy to know that the next major Thesis update is going to contain home page layout and display controls. Effectively, this is going to be the first release of Cosmo, but we’re not going to change Thesis’ name to reflect that fact.
All Thesis users are going to have access to this functionality at no additional cost, so if you were worried about having to pay more for “Cosmo,” worry no more.
