In the WordPress ecosystem, nearly everything grows bigger, slower, and more complicated over time. Themes, Plugins, you name it—they all succumb to feature creep, which most developers think is a necessary evil for growth and survival.

I have spent the last 8 years consciously moving Thesis in the opposite direction.

My only goal is to make it easier for you to run a faster, more accessible, and more maintainable website.

In other words, I’m focused on EASE.

From experience, I know most people will blindly follow the WordPress death-march toward endless complication.

But I’m hopeful what I’m about to say will resonate with many of you and provide some clarity that will reduce the stress you feel around your website.

Think about your own experience…

Have you run a website for longer than 2 years? Have you ever tried to change designs after already having one highly customized design?

If so, then you know long term adaptability is a real disaster.

This is the “big secret” WordPress Theme companies don’t want you to know…

They hope like hell you’ll use one of their designs (so they can get paid), and then they assume you’re going to hire a designer or developer to handle the tough stuff—customizations, technical integrations, etc.

But I live in the real world, where reliable designers/developers are incredibly hard to find and don’t come cheap.

In fact, they get more expensive every day because the entire industry is moving away from freelancing and toward agency-level positions.

This leaves fewer reasonable options for most website owners, and it forces the most ambitious ones to pay top dollar to work with an agency to handle customizations.

That model doesn’t work for the “little guy.”

So that begs the question: What can the little guy do?

A mindset shift focused on LESS

One of my big themes for 2018 is this idea that WordPress only moves in one direction—more, more, MORE.

If all you ever do is add stuff, your life (or your website) never gets less complicated. As a result, you are constantly forced into a state of discomfort, which means you’re farther and farther away from a state of peace.

But there’s another insidious layer to all this, too…

When WordPress “gives” you more, it’s actually asking more of you in the long term! You’ll have more, alright:

• Stuff that can break during updates
• Things to accommodate in your customizations
• Requirements for add-on components like Themes and Plugins
• Higher costs for maintenance and support due to the over-complication of everything

What a mess! At this point, you really need to ask yourself:

Has your website truly improved in the last 5 years? Or has it just gotten more complicated and more annoying to deal with?

It doesn’t have to be like this!

That said, the tough decisions are on YOU.

So what can you do? Everyone wants more, but you need less.

It’s time for some tough love and a little responsibility.

You’re going to have to be real with yourself and honest about your goals. You’re going to need to ask yourself:

• Do I really need all these Plugins?
• Do visitors care about this highly-customized design, or is it more of a vanity thing for me?
• Does that huge featured image really add value to my pages, or does it just make things slower for mobile users while forcing them to scroll more to get to content?
• Do visitors use all 14 links in my nav menu?
• How about all that junk in your sidebar? Are your visitors somehow immune to “banner blindness,” even though they exhibit it everywhere else on the internet?

These questions often yield uncomfortable answers.

Fact is, you may not be able to do everything you want to do with your website, and for a very good reason:

Website success happens when you align your goals with your visitors’ goals.

At first glance, this seems like an annoying handicap.

“What?!? I may have to change things and/or remove things I like?” (Pro tip: Nothing is sacred!)

But the more you get into the process of removing things that don’t directly serve your goals, you begin to see everything else much more clearly.

Maybe you don’t need that Plugin after all. Maybe you don’t need that crazy design customization that’s causing problems in responsive views.

Maybe your nav menu only needs 3 links instead of 14.

Heck, maybe you don’t even need that nav menu at all!

Join me and ride the Thesis wave into the future

I’ve spent the last couple months revamping the best website on the planet and the Golden Ratio Typography Calculator, and Thesis 2.7 has been an integral part of that process.

In addition to being extremely fast, both sites feature simple designs that have one main goal—to serve content to visitors quickly and clearly.

The result is somewhat shocking compared to the web designs we’ve come to expect over the last 5 years. I also think it’s pretty invigorating.

Consider, for example, some highlights from the new Pearsonified design:

No traditional navigation menu!

Instead of a universal nav, I’m using a technique called funneling that directs visitors deeper into the site via the content on the page. To see this in action, visit the home page and blog page.

You’ll also notice smart breadcrumbs on all internal pages that make it easy to understand and navigate the site hierarchy.

No sidebars

The web is a top-down medium, but designers are always thinking in terms of horizontals (columns, CSS flex boxes, grid systems, etc).

The rise of mobile, however, is pushing everyone in a more vertically-oriented direction. This has created tension between the desire to fill horizontal space on desktop displays and the reality of having no horizontal space on mobile devices.

Ultimately, responsive design is just “horizontal management.” Because of this, I have chosen to eliminate horizontals in my design, and now the responsive design process is as simple as it could possibly be.

This makes it easy, cheap, and even fun to manage my design.

No featured image fluff

“Hero” images have been trendy for years, but they also work against the idea of being efficient and accessible on every device.

In fact, a typical hero image is at least 4x larger than the HTML + CSS content of any page on my site. Thus, I will not use a big image unless it is 100% necessary for the current page.

(To be clear, I still use images wherever they are effective and helpful, but the reality is that huge hero images are generally disconnected from the goal of any particular page.)

“Enhanced” text for greater scannability

What’s the most important thing on any page of your site?

The content!

I’ve been thinking along these lines for a dozen years, but this design has helped me “see” the text in a new way.

As you click around my site, pay special attention to the use of bold text and callouts (alerts, notes, and boxes), which enhance scannability and keep the eye moving down the page.

Essentially, what I’ve done is trade the fluffy, nonessential aspects of design for the little details that improve content and make it more engaging.

The end result is an improvement in metrics related to content consumption—time spent on page, clickthrough rates, bounce rates, conversions, and all that good stuff.

Bottom line: This approach has been an enlightening experience for me, and now it’s your turn.

Don’t worry!

My guess is you’ll be afraid to make radical changes like the ones I detailed above. It’s perfectly reasonable to wonder how this might affect your SEO, conversions, or even the “way things have always been” on your site.

Heck, I was worried about my own SEO, mostly because my site has ranked extremely well for nearly 13 years!

My advice after running this design for 3 weeks? Don’t worry about it! Here’s why:

Google is switching all sites to mobile-first indexing

If your site is serving different designs to mobile vs. desktop, you’ll be penalized in the SERPs.

This means mobile Plugins like WP Touch are dead on arrival, and it also means you’ve got to make a concerted effort to have the mobile and desktop versions of your site “match.”

This is extremely easy to do if you employ the same approach I’ve used on my site.

If you like complications and added costs, though, you can always try it another way

Visitors LOVE clarity, and so do search engines!

There is no BS anywhere on my site. Every page dives straight into the content with zero distractions, offers, non-sequitur images, or unrelated calls-to-action.

There are no nav menus to hunt for, no banner ads to dismiss, and no annoying footer elements that are a magnet for accidental clicks on mobile devices.

Not surprisingly, the time spent on each page of my site is way up since the re-design, and I’ve seen a steady improvement in search traffic as well.

Of course, the extremely fast loading times are helpful here, too. The idea is simply to give visitors what they want as quickly as possible.

It may not be rocket science, but it’s certainly effective!

Adaptations and maintenance are easy.

Since I launched the new design, I’ve been employing a kaizen approach to the site, making changes and adaptations as needed.

When I had a more “design-y” design, this type of thing was a real drag—changes took forever to implement, and tweaking one thing often meant negatively affecting another.

Not anymore.

This simpler, stripped-down approach makes it easy to implement changes that work everywhere—on all devices—with minimal effort.

The “big idea” here is that my pages will look and work perfectly 5, 10, even 15 years from now with little or no modifications.

That is ease, and that’s what I want from my website experience.

After all, what’s the point of your website if not to facilitate your life in some way? If your website is a drag, then perhaps you’re doing it wrong. (I know I was.)

I want YOU to stay tuned.

If this stuff “speaks” to you, I’d like to invite you to follow along as we journey down this new path of ease and simplicity.

To do so, type your email address into the box below, and I’ll keep you updated on both the software and techniques I’m using to dominate this new era in website production.

Finally, you may also want to check out Focus so you can start running your sites the same way I do.

Thank you for reading, and I sincerely hope you found some value here today!

Thank you so much! Now how can I add links to my social media profiles?

I…well…uh…err… Darn it.

Simple questions beg for simple answers, but the best I could do was tell her that two of our Skins—Flex and Promo—come with support for social media profile links right out of the box.

That’s not good enough.

Thesis makes it easy to solve problems just like this one, so instead of telling this lady to jump through hoops or buy another product from us, I created a solution that will help anyone in her situation.

And now, I’m happy to introduce the…

Social Media Profiles Box

Want to add social media profile links to your Thesis-powered website? The Social Media Profiles Box makes it easy to add these links anywhere in your design.

Oh, and did I mention? This Box is free for anyone with an active Thesis license. You can try it right now.

Recent Thesis Updates

Are you keeping your Thesis installations up to date? If not, you’re missing out on enhanced security, WordPress and Plugin compatibility, and even updates to Thesis components like Skins and Boxes.

Here are some highlights from the most Thesis recent updates (2.6.2 and 2.6.3):

• Added the native WordPress GDPR comment consent checkbox
• Automatic OptimizePress template compatibility
• Easy Pinterest domain name verification (Thesis Admin → Site → Site Verification)
• Streamlined and enhanced the Thesis Admin with button icons
• Expanded Meta Description allowance to 320 characters
• Enhanced System Status data for better support

Got questions, concerns, or simply want to shower me with compliments? Drop a line in the comments below!

In addition, Skins with Header and/or Logo Images were displaying improperly after Skin updates.

Thesis 2.6.1 resolves these issues and also includes a couple helpful tidbits for developers. For all the gory details, check out the changelog.

We’re talking better compatibility with WordPress Plugins, better SEO with newer and smarter canonical URLs, better design with more Google Fonts and golden ratio layout tuning, and even better customization thanks to thoughtful interface tweaks.

Let’s take a look at the gory details and see why Thesis 2.6 is the most advanced Theme in the history of WordPress (and it ain’t even close).

WordPress Comment Plugin Compatibility

Thesis has always been more flexible than other Themes when it comes to comment display, but it hasn’t always played nicely with WordPress Plugins that manipulate comments.

For Thesis 2.6, I reworked the comment system and mimicked the way “standard” WordPress Themes serve comments, all while retaining the display flexibility that makes Thesis special.

Now, you can enjoy total compatibility with your favorite comment Plugins such as Thrive Comments, which I know many of you have been testing recently.

Smarter Canonical URLs for Better SEO

This is actually the biggest and most important change in Thesis 2.6. For years, both Thesis and popular WordPress SEO Plugins have handled canonical URLs, but none of these solutions were technically perfect.

Admittedly, I wasn’t aware of the shortcomings here until SEO expert Glenn Gabe performed an audit of the DIYthemes website and let me know that, “Houston, we have a problem.”

Specifically, the issue is how canonical URL implementations handle paginated blog archives and sub-pages.

For example, the second page of the Thesis Blog was reporting a canonical URL of https://diythemes.com/thesis/blog/. This was standard practice in 2013, but a lot has changed since then, and now this practice is totally wrong.

Glenn has written an extensive article on the proper way to set up canonical URLs on paginated archives, and I implemented this advice faithfully in Thesis 2.6.

Now, instead of displaying an erroneous canonical URL on paginated archives, Thesis will output a precise “daisy-chain” of pagination links and a canonical URL. To illustrate, here’s what now appears on the second page of the Thesis Blog:

<link rel="prev" href="https://diythemes.com/thesis/blog/" />
<link rel="canonical" href="https://diythemes.com/thesis/blog/page/2/" />
<link rel="next" href="https://diythemes.com/thesis/blog/page/3/" />

There are other technical concerns with canonical URLs that I won’t get into here, but at the time of writing, Thesis is the only product in the WordPress ecosystem that handles canonical URLs properly.

Even the popular Yoast SEO Plugin doesn’t handle this properly. If you’re using that Plugin (or the All in One SEO Plugin), Thesis will detect this and supply the proper canonical URL on each page of your site.

Bottom line: Thesis has always been on the cutting edge of SEO, and version 2.6 only reaffirms our commitment to this purpose.

(Side note: Try to imagine any other Theme provider giving this level of attention to something only search engines can see. Go ahead—I’ll wait!)

Faster Google Font Rendering!

Ever since I first implemented Google Fonts in Thesis, I’ve been obsessed with one thing—serving these fonts as quickly as possible to mitigate the associated performance hit.

In 2014, this meant using the asynchronous WebFont Loader script to load Google Fonts in a way that would not block the page rendering. This method works quite well, but there’s one major drawback—FOUT, or “flash of unstyled text.”

Here’s how that works: When you load up any Thesis site with a Google Font, you’ll see a very brief shift where a backup font is rendered, and then it will quickly switch to the Google Font once it’s completely loaded.

It’s a bit wonky, and even though the overall page performance is better this way, it seems worse to the user because of this strange text shift.

This has always bothered me, so for Thesis 2.6, I decided to test various methods of implementing Google Fonts to see if there was a high-performance, low-FOUT solution.

Well, a lot has changed since 2014, and now browsers are quite adept at a process known as DNS prefetching. When used with Google Fonts, DNS prefetching delivers a performant solution that almost completely eliminates FOUT.

With Thesis 2.6, if you’re using Google Fonts on your Thesis site, your pages will appear to load faster and with no FOUT!

One thing worth noting here: Of all the performance testing tools I use, only Google PageSpeed Insights seems to hate all solutions besides the aforementioned asynchronous WebFont Loader.

Meanwhile, GTmetrix, WebPageTest, and Pingdom Tools all report nearly identical performance between asynchronous loading and DNS prefetching.

And lest I forget—I added 13 new Google Fonts to the mix in version 2.6, which means Thesis now includes 113 Google Fonts by default.

But what if you’d like to use one of the 750-ish Google Fonts that isn’t already included? I’ve got you covered, and I made it easy to add your own Google Fonts to Thesis!

Even Better Typography

Wait, what? How does the Theme with the best typography get even better?

Research and elbow grease, obviously!

Some of you may recall my past work on golden ratio typography. From time to time, I’ve returned to this research to refine the results and produce even more precise typography.

Thesis 2.6 includes the most significant advancements to golden ratio typography since I first introduced the concept.

What changed? Well, better measurements lead to better results, and I finally developed a reliable way to measure the x-height of various fonts.

This enables Thesis to make extremely precise adjustments based on the physical characteristics of the fonts you select, thereby ensuring typographic perfection in any environment!

But that’s not all. Typography isn’t just about fonts—it’s also about the whitespace throughout your design.

In the updated Classic Responsive Skin (version 1.6), I’ve employed golden ratio proportionality in three key ways—line heights, font scales, and whitespace. Under this arrangement, everything just looks “right,” and that’s because all sizes and spacing are connected by the golden ratio!

Check out the updated Classic Responsive Skin demo [edit: link removed] and see what true proportionality can do for your design.

(And naturally, I’ll be applying similar treatments to our other Skins as we run through the next round of updates.)

Thesis Skin HTML Editor UI Tweaks

New light blue coloring on unopened containers makes it easier to see how Boxes are arranged within a template.

If you’re an advanced Thesis user, you probably spend a fair amount of time in the Skin HTML Editor. As such, you may have noticed that it was hard to see a difference between opened and unopened containers in your templates.

In Thesis 2.6, unopened containers are displayed with a light blue coloring that makes them very easy to spot.

I’ve been working with this setup for about a month, and I really like how this added bit of color makes it easier to understand and parse template architecture with only a glance.

BONUS: Massively Updated Documentation!

In addition to building Thesis 2.6, I spent the last month completely overhauling the Thesis Documentation.

Documentation pages and associated links are up-to-date through Thesis 2.6, and there is a TON of great information you can use right now to run your site like a boss.

Finally, you may also want to have a look at the complete Thesis 2.6 changelog.

And what about those breadcrumbs in the User’s Guide? Let’s just say I’ll be sharing more information about those in an upcoming article

Enjoy the power of Thesis 2.6!

Naturally, the design is mobile-responsive and optimized for speed, and I was even able to reduce the amount of custom code needed to run everything by over 90%!

But there’s something far more interesting about this redesign…

A huge part of the effort had nothing to do with CSS or pixels; instead, it was about going back through all the old content and repackaging it in a more useful, organized way.

Today, we’ll look at the some of the lessons I learned from this experience. These are all things you’ll want to copy to improve your own sites!

1. Smart content curation with categories

There’s nearly a decade of content on this site—over 275 posts and pages—and we’ve covered a wide range of topics in that time.

We’ve always used categories to organize our posts, and while I definitely recommend this strategy, there’s some serious wisdom and perspective to be gained when you look back on 10 years of content.

In this case, I realized our old categories could be trimmed and tweaked to provide better organization and information for visitors.

More specifically, I went back through every post on the site, assessed the content, and then applied category labels to create rich, connected archives. (I also renamed some old categories to make them more relevant, and I deleted a few others.)

For example, check out our awesome new Website Marketing archive, which contains insights from some of the biggest names in internet marketing.

Also note how that archive page is not paginated—every relevant link is right there on one handy page. This makes it so you can use your browser’s “find” feature to easily locate whatever you’re seeking.

Pro tip: Categories make way more sense when they are applied after you’ve created a lot of content. When you create categories before having content to categorize, you are simply guessing at the topics your site is likely to cover.

2. Add unique content to category pages

Thesis adds special options to WordPress you can use to customize and enrich archive pages on your website:

Thesis adds options to your WordPress archives so you can customize them for both search engines and visitors!

I used these options to create enhanced archives like this one about customizing your design.

Once again, note how this archive is not paginated. Thesis allows you to select how many posts you want to show on each archive page, so I set this one to a large enough number to display all relevant posts on one page.

As you can see, Thesis’ archive options are handy for providing finely tuned, customized resources for your visitors!

But that’s not the only benefit—enhanced archive pages are also great for SEO.

3. Create resource pages with no distractions

Resource pages are the ultimate curation tactic. They’re easy to make, search engines love ’em, and your visitors will, too.

All you need to do is identify related content that can help your audience, and then construct a resource page to highlight this content.

Here’s our resource page covering WordPress SEO for Everybody; notice how I have presented this in landing page format with no sidebars and no distractions.

Note: Official Thesis Skins from DIYthemes include a Landing Page template that’s perfect for resource pages like these!

4. What to do with deprecated content that still ranks well in search engines?

This is a really cool topic that doesn’t get nearly the attention it deserves.

The DIYthemes Blog has been around for almost 10 years, so this is a big issue for us. Lots of content on the blog is outdated but still ranks well in search engines.

I certainly don’t want to mislead potential customers who discover Thesis through these old pages, but I also don’t want to delete these valuable “search assets.”

So…what to do?

First, stick those old posts in a Deprecated category.

Second, add an alert to each deprecated post and send some link juice back to a more relevant location, as seen atop this old article.

In this case, I simply linked deprecated posts back to the blog home page, which I know contains the most relevant information about both Thesis and web development.

Now, visitors will know these posts are deprecated, and they’ll also know where to go to get the latest and greatest information.

5. Limit comment delivery

Comments are a great way to interact with your readers, but they aren’t free—they increase page load times, especially if you show avatars.

And on blogs that have received thousands of comments through the years (like this one), most of the older comments are irrelevant, misleading, and may even deter new customers.

Because of this, merely closing comments on old posts is inadequate. I don’t want new visitors reading outdated or incorrect information, and I certainly don’t want to slow down their browsing experience by serving a bunch of garbage I don’t even want them to read.

Now, after 180 days (which is how long comments are open on this site), I no longer serve the comments section on posts.

This is extremely easy to do with Thesis display filters, but if you’re using a different WordPress theme, you may not have a reasonable way to do this.

Never forget—you’re always building something bigger!

When you’re cranking out blog posts, it’s easy to lose sight of the fact you’re always creating something much bigger.

The article you write today might be useful, but when you combine that article with a few other related ones, you’ve got something far more valuable.

Once a year, make it a habit to go back through your content and thoughtfully consider the overall organization and categorization.

See if you can repackage your archives and turn them into a series of epic resource pages that visitors and search engines will love!

In this article, I’ll show you how Thesis has the best and most flexible Schema support of any WordPress theme.

After that, we’ll take a look at the new Global Site Tag, which massively simplifies the process of configuring your website with Google tools and services.

Ready to dive in? Let’s go!

Post/Page Schema Controls for Perfect Rich Snippets

Since 2013, Thesis has included Schema markup support, and Skins took advantage of this by specifying a default Schema on included templates.

For example, the Classic Responsive Skin runs the BlogPosting Schema by default, thereby adding rich snippet data to every post and page of your site. Search engines love this!

But what if you have a page that calls for a different Schema, such as NewsArticle or Product?

Prior to Thesis 2.5, the only reasonable way to do this was to create a new custom template and specify a different Schema for that template. You would then need to select this custom template on any post or page that called for this different Schema.

In my view, that’s too complicated to be a realistic option for most people. Even worse, the custom template approach is something that only applies to the current Skin. If you change your Skin in the future, these Schema associations will not carry over between Skins—not good!

Thankfully, there’s a much better way to do this.

Ideally, each piece of content should be associated with the Schema most pertinent to it. In other words, Schema is a content-level association and not a theme-, Skin-, or even template-level association.

That’s why Thesis 2.5 adds a new Schema selector to your WordPress post editor, enabling you to associate a particular Schema with each post or page of your site.

Now, no matter which Thesis Skin you use, your chosen Schema will take precedence over whatever defaults are defined in the Skin.

But that’s not all!

Some Plugins like WooCommerce and Easy Digital Downloads (and many others) output their own Schema on certain pages. With previous versions of Thesis, this would have resulted in two Schema being output on the same page—the Skin default as well as the Plugin-specified Schema.

With the new Schema selector in Thesis 2.5, you can specify “No Schema,” and this will prevent your Thesis Skin from outputting any default Schema on this page. This clears the way for your Plugins to add their own Schema, ensuring you’ll have the most pertinent Rich Snippet data on each page of your site.

Pro tip: Both Post Boxes and Query Boxes (the two places where default Schema can be specified within Thesis Skins) now respect the post/page-level Schema settings. This means you’ll always have perfect Schema output everywhere!

Analytics Evolved: Google Global Site Tag

Over the past couple years, Google has greatly expanded the tracking and tagging services it offers to provide deep, actionable data for webmasters.

However, the negative side of this expansion has been that hardcore webmasters have found themselves needing to manage many different scripts and tags in their code. Some examples include:

• Analytics
• Site Verification
• Tag Manager
• Experiments

Even worse, all these scripts had different implementation requirements which turned this whole tracking/tagging process into a technical and organizational nightmare.

But now that Google has introduced the Global Site Tag, all of this is about to change for the better.

The Global Site Tag is a one-stop shop for Analytics and other tracking/tagging services Google provides.

Services like Analytics, Site Verification, Tag Manager, Experiments, and more are available through the Global Site Tag, and you can control all this stuff from your Google account.

In other words, there’s no longer a need to paste code in various places throughout your HTML to implement advanced Google services. Can I get an amen?

If you’re a Thesis user who was already using the native Google Analytics implementation, your site will automatically switch to the new Global Site Tag when you update to Thesis 2.5.

The Bottom Line

The internet is constantly in flux, and you need a theme that’s adaptable to this ever-changing landscape.

Thesis makes it easy to keep everything up-to-date with the latest web standards and specs, and this leads to faster loading times, better SEO, and easier maintenance over time.

On top of that, “instant upgrades” like granular Schema support and the Global Site Tag are poignant examples of how Thesis can level up your website in an instant.

Finally, if you’d like more information on what’s new in Thesis 2.5, check out the changelog.

Our goal at DIYthemes has always been a simple one: We want to help you build a fast, standards-compliant website you love.

Of course, this is why we built Thesis, and it’s also why we continue to focus on making it more efficient and easier to use.

But here’s the thing…

No matter how good Thesis or any other Theme is, you still have to set up your website and make it your own.

This process involves Plugins, tracking codes (like Google Analytics), integrations, and design tweaks, and in almost every case, this requires you to learn a new system—or multiple systems—to pull it all off!

Unsurprisingly, by the time everything is said and done, your site has transformed into a slow, disorganized shell of its former self. You probably have more gray hair, too.

Where Did It All Go So Wrong?

While working support over the past year, I’ve seen the following situation more times than I can count:

A smart person like you—but not a website expert—sets up a website and finally gets everything working. It’s a herculean effort, and it definitely involves some pain and headaches along the way.

Unfortunately, your reward at the end of this journey is simply realizing you have a whole new set of problems. Deflating? Yep. Frustrating? Absolutely!

Here are the most common performance issues we see every day with “completed” websites:

• Slow and wonky loading times (a problem that’s even worse on mobile devices!)
• Overload of CSS and JS files from too many Plugins
• Web standards violations from poorly coded Plugins and improper integrations
• Compromised design responsiveness due to Plugins or other customizations
• Improper placement of scripts
• Outdated Google Fonts integrations
• Super slow WP Admin performance

Oh, and I’ve got to give an honorable mention to the people out there who have [1] multiple Plugins that perform the same function, and [2] so many Plugins that they can no longer tell what is useful versus what is unnecessary.

Sound familiar?

It’s not your fault! The web now has so many disparate pieces that need to come together for a successful website, you’ve got to be a seasoned expert to stay on top of everything.

Fortunately, this is where we come in!

We Will Fix the Mess and Make Your Site Fast Again!

We see these problems so often that we can no longer ignore what’s happening here.

Starting today, we are here to clean up the mess and bring next-level organization to your website with our expert optimization service.

We’ll take a detailed look at your website, solve the major performance problems, and ensure your site is set up in the best way possible moving forward.

We already made great strides with Thesis 2.3 and its built-in WooCommerce compatibility, and we also sprinkled in some features and fixes that help Thesis work better wherever you want to use it (staging servers, WP-CLI environments, etc).

With Thesis 2.4, we are pleased to introduce a new saving/response feedback system on Thesis Admin pages and the Skin Editor. Whenever you hit that green Save button, Thesis will tell you exactly what’s happening.

And that’s just the tip of the iceberg with Thesis 2.4. Check out the version 2.4 changelog, or else read on for a look at the most important updates in this new version.

Compatibility with Plugins that Serve Custom Templates!

Due to the way Thesis serves templates, getting it to play nicely with Plugins that serve custom templates has always been a bit tricky.

Not anymore.

Thesis 2.4 includes a modified template launch sequence that mimics the basic WordPress template system, and this allows it to accommodate Plugins that serve custom templates.

Boom.

Thesis Skin Data Manager Enhancements

Thesis 2.3 included a redesigned Skin Data Manager, but it was still a little buggy and rough around the edges. For version 2.4, I went through every detail of the Skin Data Manager with Pearson’s Famous Code Polish.

The result is a more robust system that performs backups, restorations, imports, exports, and default resets with speed and precision. (And for those interested, I squashed the bug with certain data failing to Export/Import properly.)

And the best part? The Skin Data Manager now performs incredibly handy…

Automatic Skin Data Backups!

With Thesis 2.4, certain actions (like Skin updates) will trigger automatic data backups in case anything goes wrong.

Restoring default options will also trigger an automatic backup, and beyond that, you can choose to create an automatic backup when performing restorations or imports.

The general idea here is that no matter what you want to do with your Skin, Thesis is smart enough to provide you with an “anchor point” to return to if something goes haywire!

More Info at Your Fingertips

Skins, Boxes, and even Thesis itself now contain handy links to relevant documentation and changelogs.

Unsure how something works? Want to know what’s new? Detailed explanations and assistance are only a click away on most Thesis Admin screens.

Valet Skin Updates

In the past, certain Skin updates required you to manually reset data like your Skin CSS, Editor CSS, or even your CSS Variables.

What is this, the 1900s?

Thankfully, Thesis 2.4 frees you from this burden with completely automated Skin updates. Now your Skin CSS, Editor CSS, and CSS Variables will update along with your Skin, and then Thesis will generate a fresh CSS file based on your options settings.

Oh, and you’ll be able to restore an automatic Skin backup should anything go wrong with the update.

Are you picking up on the trend here? Thesis 2.4 has your back!

System Status: Last-modified time for Skin CSS file

A common issue we see in support is where someone makes changes to their Design options, successfully saves them, but then the changes don’t appear on the live site.

Whenever this happens, the culprit is some sort of caching…but in the days of “Managed WordPress Hosting,” a lot of this caching is deployed at the server level—not by a Plugin you control.

Thesis 2.4 includes new System Status data that is helpful for diagnosing—and ultimately solving—these caching problems. By checking the last-modified time of your Skin CSS file, you can see whether the current CSS file is as up-to-date as you expect it to be.

If it isn’t, you may need to use your host’s caching tools (most Managed WordPress Hosts provide these) to update the cache to pick up your CSS changes.

Automatic Embed in Text Boxes (YouTube, etc)

Drop an embedded link to something like a YouTube video in a Text Box, and Thesis will now automatically embed the requested video. The WordPress post editor works exactly the same way.

Attention Devs! Data Handling Improvements

Thesis 2.4 handles data in a more simplified and universal way than previous versions. These improvements not only squashed some lingering bugs, but they also created an opportunity to further simplify the Thesis development experience.

Which leads us to…

New Escaping/Formatting API Methods

Developers who create Skins or Boxes for Thesis often need to use both escaping and formatting functions to output data that gets input through Thesis Admin screens.

The Thesis API has always contained special functions to do this, but they were unnecessarily complicated because of the way older versions of Thesis handled user-input data.

Thesis 2.4 includes new escaping/formatting methods that developers should use in their Skins and Boxes—it’ll ensure you’ve got top-notch text everywhere!

More Random Wins in Thesis 2.4

There’s so much good stuff in Thesis 2.4, we can’t possibly shine the spotlight on everything. That said, here are a few more “little wins” I know you’ll appreciate:

• Delete Skin functionality now works on the Manage Skins page
• Enhanced WooCommerce support for product image galleries
• Changed Thesis Admin menu timing to avoid potential Plugin conflicts
• Removed annoying underlines from abbr tags (new browser “feature”)
• Alphabetized Thesis Admin Boxes submenu
• Excerpt Box “read more” text now pulls from post meta data (if it exists)
• New thesis_skin_memory_limit filter allows for easy memory limit adjustments

What’s next? Skin and Box updates!

After updating to Thesis 2.4, you’ll begin to see a trickle of updates for official Skins and Boxes.

Because of the changes to data handling in this new version, we are refining Skin data and adding helpful features like full WooCommerce compatibility, improved CSS organization, and more advanced text and form input formatting.

We’ve already updated our Classic Responsive and Social Triggers Skins for Thesis 2.4, and you can grab those now via automatic updates.

Note: If you’re using any other Skin that doesn’t yet have a 2.4-compliant update, you may need to use the Fix CSS Box to tidy up your design after updating to Thesis 2.4.

You can also expect a steady stream of Box updates in the coming days. Certain Boxes, like AWeber and MailChimp, need special treatment to bring their UI behaviors into line with the new saving/feedback system in Thesis 2.4.

Fortunately, I’ve already updated these Boxes along with a few others, and you’ll receive these automatic updates in the Thesis Admin, too.

In reality, Thesis is a comprehensive template system that gives you total control over your design and allows you to do things that simply aren’t possible with a traditional WordPress Theme.

In other words, Thesis is a powerful tool you can use to build the high-performance website of your dreams.

That’s great, but let’s face it—what you really need to know is how to harness the awesome power of Thesis!

These 3 Webinars Will Turn You into a Thesis Pro

Long-time Thesis expert Rick Anderson (8+ years) routinely produces free webinars that teach people how to create their own websites and master their own domains.

Last month, I teamed up with Rick on 3 exhaustive webinars to explain and demonstrate the basic functionality of Thesis.

Whether you’re an individual running your own site or a designer, developer, or agency, these webinars are incredibly useful resources you can use to take your game to the next level.

• [links removed because they were as dead as the dodo]

Each of the webinars also includes a helpful, text-based outline of the material it covers, and you can use this information to track down specific portions of the webinars that are most applicable to your needs.

In other industries, I’ve seen equivalent information sell for $1500+, but Rick and I want you to have free access to this incredibly valuable information.

You’ll see for yourself when you watch the webinars, but every time we do one of these things, we can see the lightbulbs coming on for people as they realize, “Wow, I can do all of this on my own now!”

Once you understand the power of Thesis, there’s nothing that can stop you!

This is primarily a bugfix release, and you can check out all the gory details in the changelog.

Please note that if you’re an existing Flex user, version 1.3.1 includes updated Skin CSS. To apply it properly, follow these steps:

1. Update your Skin CSS
2. Save your Design options

That’s it!