photo credit: eye of einstein

Black Friday has become somewhat of an institution in the US. The day after Thanksgiving, everyone seems to discount prices for one day only, even those who usually wouldn’t. And that includes DIYthemes:

“We’re offering 20% off for 150 people who use a special code starting right now until Friday night at 11:59 pm Eastern time. We don’t want to interfere with people’s real-space shopping, so the discount code is effective right now – for the first 150 people only!”

That works out to:

$69.60 for Thesis Personal

$131.20 for Thesis Developer

$61.60 for Developer Upgrade

IMPORTANT! – You must use this code to get the discount – 20D03977D0 (don’t forget this!).

ALSO IMPORTANT – There’s only 150 spots available for this coupon code – 20D03977D0 (just cut and paste the code into your order).

If you’ve been thinking about buying Thesis but have been putting it off, now is the time to get it.

Post from: Thesis WordPress Theme

Thesis Black Friday Sale

photo credit: vagawi

In a previous post (What Are My Thesis Theme Options?) I showed the options screens you can use to customize the Thesis Theme for your blog. In this post, which is the first of a series, I’m going to dive into more of the details for each of these options. And I’m going to reveal the new ones that were added in the Thesis 1.2 release.

As we saw before, there are two options screens available in the Admin interface of WordPress that can be used to customize the Thesis Theme: Thesis Options and Design Options. Rather than show you the entire page for these screens, I’m going to show you individual elements and explain how they are important to your blog.

Design Options Admin Page

Design Options didn’t change much since the last release. You can still set your overall blog layout from 1 to 3 columns (this blog is set to 2 columns). After you set the number of columns, you can select the size of each column. (The only option you do not have is a sidebar column to the left of the content area.) And you can specify the font and size to use for all the various elements that make up a blog page. This screen shows a partial display of these options:

Thesis 1.2 Design Options (Note: Only Partial Display Shown)

I did notice a few subtle changes in the 1.2 release, such as the use of an asterisk to identify web-safe fonts among the list of available fonts. That’s the sort of attention to detail that sets this theme apart. And the sense of humor in things like the “Big Ass Save Button” (the name of which you can also customize).

Here is the full list of elements for which you can change the font and font size: 

• Body
• Content Area
• Sub-headlines
• Navigation Menu
• Header
• Tagline
• Headlines
• Bylines and Post Meta Data
• Multimedia Box
• Sidebars
• Sidebar Headings
• Footer

Thesis Options Admin Page

There were a lot of additions to the Thesis Options page in the Thesis 1.2 release. Let’s look at some of these options. In case you thought I was kidding about customizing the “Big Ass Save Button,” let’s look at that one first.

Big Ass Save Button

From what I can gather, Chris Pearson has an interesting sense of humor. One aspect of this that caught everyone’s attention early on was the naming of the “Save” button for Thesis Theme changes.

Of course, Chris also lets you change the name of the Save button, but he doesn’t recommend that you do so. Funny guy, eh?

Title Tag Display Options

Changing how your page titles are constructed can influence your search engine optimization. The basic idea is that you want important keywords to appear early in your title text.

If your tagline contains important keywords (and it probably should) you’ll likely want the tagline to appear before your site name. And since your site name might not be a meaningful keyword itself, you might not want it to appear on individual page or post titles. In the case of this blog, the site name is relevant so I do append it.

Publishing Display Options

Most blogs will want their title and tagline to appear in the header of each post, but you can turn those off if you like.

Byline information can be altered in a number of ways. I keep mine simple and include only the published-on date. If you have multiple authors on your blog you’d want to include author names. Page bylines can be changed independent of post bylines.

Getting visitors to read the entirety of your posts is important. The question mark link next to this option takes you to an article that describes the alternatives you might want to consider. The default continuation text is “[click to continue…]“, and I have changed mine to read “[Click here to continue reading…]“.

When readers are on a single post, you have the option of displaying links to the previous and next post in chronological order. These links appear at the very bottom of the page, after the comments and comment entry fields. Here is an example of what they look like:

The final option here is to disable comments on all pages. Note that it is talking about pages, not posts. Comments are common on posts, and less common on pages, which is why I have chosen to disable them. If you just love comments, even on pages, you can leave them turned on here.

I hope this helps those of you who are new to Thesis, or are evaluating it for possible purchase. Check back here for the next in this series of “revealing” posts. Better yet, subscribe to updates by RSS or email, so you won’t miss anything. And let me know if you found this helpful by leaving me a comment.

Post from: Thesis WordPress Theme

Thesis Theme 1.2 Revealed

On Friday, Chris Pearson announced that the Thesis 1.2 upgrade was available. Rick Beckman posted some details on his blog, which looked interesting. I finally got some free time this weekend to backup and upgrade my various sites, and I’m very pleased with the results.

There were a couple of default settings that I turned off right away as they weren’t appropriate for my particular sites, but other than that the upgrade process was very smooth. This site is now running Thesis 1.2 as well. For the most part it still looks the same. But I now have a lot more configuration options at my disposal, as well as a bunch of new hooks (I’ll explain hooks in the next post).

This is a very interesting upgrade to Thesis. I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again: I really like the direction Chris is taking this theme. I think he is building a very solid foundation for lots of future customizations. I think we are going to start to see some very clever sites built with Thesis, based on all the new capabilities. At the same time, anyone who just wants a good looking site without a lot of hassle will be very pleased with Thesis out-of-the-box.

I’ve got one more final site to upgrade, then I’ll come back here and post a detailed review of what is included in this new release. In the mean time, what are you waiting for? Go get a great looking theme for your WordPress blog..

Post from: Thesis WordPress Theme

Thesis 1.2 Upgrade

This is going to be a short post. But not as short as a tweet. Don’t know what a tweet is? You should. A tweet is to Twitter as a post is to WordPress. Only is tweet is no more than 140 characters. And while a tweet is very short, don’t let that fool you – there’s more to tweeting than meets the eye.

Participating in the “twitterverse” is a unique experience that is hard to describe. And saying that a tweet is just a short blog post is barely scratching the surface. Twitter is a lot like jazz: much easier understood by experiencing it, rather than simply talking about it. So while the rest of this post will talk about integrating Twitter with WordPress, our first piece of advice is to experience Twitter for yourself: create an account, follow folks with a common interest, and create your own tweets. Then come back here and read the rest of this post.

Assuming you’ve done that, the next step is to entice people to follow you, by integrating your Twitter activities with your blogging activities. There are two simple steps you can follow to do so. First, simply add a link to your Twitter profile on your blog. That way, any of your blog readers who are also on Twitter will be able to follow you quickly and easily. A simple WordPress Text widget will do the job, such as the one we used on this website:

Second, you can display your recent tweets inside another widget in your sidebar. The easiest way to do so is to use the “Twitter for WordPress” plugin. This plugin is very simple, but it’s all you really need to do the job of highlighting your participation on Twitter. Your goal is to get your blog readers interested in following you by showing a few of your recent tweets. The “Twitter for WordPress” plugin does that for you, allowing you to select the number of tweets to display, as well as a few other simple configuration options. Once installed, you can add a Twitter widget to your sidebar that looks something like this:

There’s a lot more you can do with Twitter, but the best way to start is to keep it simple. But do get started. Twitter is the hot new social networking tool, and you don’t want to miss out. And while you are at it, feel free to follow ThesisTheme to keep up on our latest activities tweets.

Post from: Thesis WordPress Theme

How To Use Twitter For WordPress

photo credit: tanakawho

Photographs can help turn an ordinary blog posting into something memorable.  And the easiest way to add a photo to one of your posts is to use a WordPress plugin called Photo Dropper.

The Photo Dropper plugin makes it easy to find and embed any image from Flickr that is available under a Creative Commons (CC) license. Even better, it creates a link that gives credit to the photo owner, meeting the attribution requirement of the CC license.  And it even lets you search for a photo, select the size that you want, and embed the appropriate HTML code, all from the comfort of the WordPress post editor.

Photo Dropper provides terrific functionality, but the results you get out-of-the-box don’t exactly blend in well with the Thesis Theme.  So the rest of this post will show you how to make the Flickr photos you get through Photo Dropper look like a natural extension of Thesis.

Customizing The Photo Dropper Plugin

The first thing we want to do is customize Photo Dropper so that it inserts a bit of HTML before and after the image. That HTML code will reference a custom class that we can then define in our custom CSS file. Our CSS file will define the visual qualities that will make our dropped-in photos look like a natural part of our Thesis site.

So after you’ve installed the Photo Dropper plugin, go to the Settings for Photo Dropper, scroll to the bottom of the options, and enter the DIV code to match what you see in the image below (type “<div class=photo_right>” into the Insert Before field, and “</div>” into the Insert After field):

Photo Dropper Customization

Customizing Your CSS Code

Now that we have customized Photo Dropper to wrap our photos inside a DIV element with a custom class, we can go about defining the attributes of that custom class within our CSS code.  What we want to do is modify the “custom.css” file contained within the “custom” folder of the “thesis” theme folder.  Add the following lines to custom.css, save the file and FTP it back to your server:

.custom .photo_left, .custom .photo_right {
	background: #eee;
	border: 0.071em solid #ccc;
	color: #888;
	margin-bottom: 1.571em;
	padding: 0.714em;
}

.custom .photo_center {
	clear: both;
	color: #888;
	float: none;
	margin-bottom: 1.571em;
	text-align: center;
}

.custom .photo_left {
	clear: left;
	float: left;
	margin-right: 1.571em;
	text-align: left;
}

.custom .photo_right {
	clear: right;
	float: right;
	margin-left: 1.571em;
	text-align: right;
}

.custom .photo_center img {
	background: #eee;
	border: 0.071em solid #ccc;
	margin-bottom: -2.714em;
	padding: 0.714em 0.714em 2.714em 0.714em;
}

.custom .photo_center small a img {
	background: transparent;
	border: none;
	margin: 0;
	padding: 0;
}

.custom .photo_center small a, .custom .photo_left small a, .custom .photo_right small a {
	color: inherit;
	text-decoration: none;
}

That’s it! Now you can simply use Photo Dropper. When you do, you’ll see it insert HTML code that looks similar to this:

<div class=photo_right><a title="Photo Title" href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/..." target="_blank"><img src="http://farm2.static.flickr.com/..." border="0" alt="Alternate" /></a> <small><a title="Attribution License" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/" target="_blank"><img src="http://www.thesistheme.org/wp-content/plugins/photo-dropper/images/cc.png" border="0" alt="Creative Commons License" width="16" height="16" align="absmiddle" /></a> <a href="http://www.photodropper.com/photos/" target="_blank">photo</a> credit: <a title="Owner" href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/..." target="_blank">Photographer</a></small></div>

We’ve got the default set up to use the “photo_right” class, which floats the photo to the right of the text, but you can easily change that on a case-by-case basis to use the “photo_left” class if you want to float the photo to the left.

Photo Dropper Before And After

The easiest way to understand everything that the custom CSS code is providing is to show a dropped-in photo without any formatting, and the same photo using our customizations. Here is a picture of a green leaf, dropped in using the defaults provided by Photo Dropper.

photo credit: Krassy Can Do It
Notice how the text doesn’t flow around the image, the anchor links are rather prominent, and there’s no frame around the image. It just doesn’t look like it fits in.

photo credit: Krassy Can Do It

And here is the same photograph with our custom styles applied. Notice how the entire thing, image, links and all, are placed within a nice, subtle frame. And our text is flowing around the image, which is floating to the right. Even the credit line floats to the right.

And the credit line, while still containing links back to the owner of the photograph, is a nice subtle shade of gray so that our readers can focus on our content and not be overly distracted by the photos. The photos are meant to support our content, not lead readers off to play with Flickr for the rest of the day.

So that’s it! Now all you Thesis bloggers can go forth and Flickr with Photo Dropper. And if you like these tips, please leave me a comment and/or subscribe to the RSS feed so you don’t miss out on any.

Post from: Thesis WordPress Theme

How To Use Photo Dropper With Thesis

photo credit: Un ragazzo chiamato Bi

The latest update to the Thesis Theme introduced additional features and options.  What options were added to the new version?  The best way to answer that question is to simply show you.

One of the goals of the Thesis Theme is to give you, the blogger, the ability to customize the look and behavior of your blog without having to change any of the PHP code, or CSS styles. You can still do that if you need to, but common cases should be handled by configuration screens visible within the Admin interface of WordPress.

Version 1.1 of the Thesis Theme has expanded on this original concept by now giving you two screens full of options: “Thesis Options” and “Design Options.”  Below are screen shots of each of these, showing all the options at your fingertips.

Thesis Options

The first options page shows the general options for your blog:

Thesis Options

Design Options

The other options page allows you to easily change the fonts and column layout of your blog:

Design Options

Customizations

As you can see, I haven’t modified many of the default settings for this blog. I imagine that will change over time as I expand on the foundation that I am building here. But one of the things I really liked was how good the Thesis Theme looked without any customization at all. Of course, many bloggers like to create a distinctive look to their blogs, and this new version of the Thesis Theme is making it even easier to achieve that objective. I can’t wait to see what the next version brings.

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What Are My Thesis Theme Options?

photo credit: iChaz

I just got done updating all my WordPress sites to the latest version of the Thesis Theme. Version 1.1 includes even more easily selected options, such as the choice of font, number of columns, etc. I’ll write a longer post with more details about this upgrade, but for now I must say I’m impressed and feel like I’m getting my money’s worth.

I will say that I wasn’t completely happy with the upgrade process due to a slight glitch where your site would appear in a single narrow column until you visited the two configuration pages. I get the impression that this isn’t unique to this particular theme, and that WordPress doesn’t provide a seamless mechanism for upgrades. As a blogger I expect better, but as a software engineer I also understand why some things are the way they are. Fortunately, it was easy enough to work around that little wrinkle. We’ll have to see what other upgraders have to say about the process.

To end on a positive note, I like the direction that Chris Pearson is taking with this theme, and with this upgrade in particular. If he keeps improving the theme at a reasonable pace the result is going to be fantastic. And if he stopped right now, I’d probably still be happy. (But I hope he doesn’t stop!)

Post from: Thesis WordPress Theme

Thesis 1.1 Was Just Released

photo credit: pshutterbug

Here is a list of update services that appear to be active.  Feel free to cut and paste these into your WordPress settings. And if I missed any good ones, be sure to let me know.

• http://rpc.pingomatic.com/
• http://api.moreover.com/ping
• http://api.moreover.com/RPC2
• http://api.my.yahoo.com/RPC2
• http://api.my.yahoo.com/rss/ping
• http://blogsearch.google.com/ping/RPC2
• http://ping.bitacoras.com
• http://ping.feedburner.com
• http://ping.syndic8.com/xmlrpc.php
• http://ping.weblogalot.com/rpc.php
• http://rpc.blogrolling.com/pinger/
• http://rpc.icerocket.com:10080/
• http://rpc.technorati.com/rpc/ping
• http://rpc.weblogs.com/RPC2
• http://topicexchange.com/RPC2
• http://www.blogdigger.com/RPC2
• http://www.blogoole.com/ping/
• http://www.popdex.com/addsite.php
• http://www.wasalive.com/ping/

Note: Based on further investigation, I have changed my list of services to only use pingomatic.com. Listing more services runs the risk of appearing to be a spammer.

Post from: Thesis WordPress Theme

Active Update Services

photo credit: pingnews.com

Welcome to my blog.  I created it to save you time finding a great theme for your blog.  I looked at a lot of blog software and choose WordPress, in large part because of it’s popularity.  While I am a software engineer, I wanted blog software that would be simple to set up and simple to use.  WordPress met that requirement.

I had the same desire for my WordPress theme.  After trying several I came across the Thesis Theme by Chris Pearson and was intrigued.  I bought it, tried it out, and liked it so much I decided to create a website to show it off.  I hope you find this useful and I hope I can save you the time and hassle of making a lot of mistakes.  I think you will like the Thesis Theme, and I think this site will give you a better idea of what it can do for you, at least from my point of view.

Post from: Thesis WordPress Theme

Hello WordPress World!