That’s right folks. The highly anticipated major release of Thesis just hit the streets! The long awaited Thesis 2.0 is here.

This new version of Thesis is completely different from Thesis 1.x in many ways. The new interface is designed to make it easier for the “DIY’er” to make design and function updates to their site, although there will be somewhat of a learning curve to get this down.

First things first though.

How to Install Thesis 2.0 for the First Time

1. Upload the thesis folder to your themes folder in WordPress
2. Activate the theme as you would any other WordPress theme from your WordPress Dashboard
3. After Thesis 2.0 is activated, click the “click here to get started” link, which will install the default skins and folders where your custom skins, boxes and packages will go.

   

4. Compile the CSS. With Thesis 2.0, CSS is generated primarily from CSS packages. These are designed to help the DIY’er style fonts, links, colors, backgrounds etc. through a visual interface. For any changes to take place, you need to recompile your CSS. The first time you activate Thesis 2.0, it’s a good idea to compile the CSS.

   Head over to “Skins” and click the “Skin Editor”. Then click “CSS” and then “Save and Compile CSS”. See the screenshots below for a visual:

   
   
   

5. Now you can check out your site.

The Site Menu

Within the site menu you have the following options:

• HTML Head Editor, where you can manage your site’s output and do things like set your favicon, verify your site with Google and Bing webmaster tools, implement the Google+ rel author spec, and more
• Tracking Scripts, which give you a handy way to integrate Google Analytics and other scripts that monitor site performance
• 404 Page Selector, which allows you to select (and edit!) your site’s 404 page
• Home Page SEO Controls that will help you optimize the most important page of your site

Skins, Boxes and Packages

One of the biggest changes in Thesis 2.0 is the addition of Skins, Boxes and Packages. Although Skins have been around for a while, they are now more tightly integrated into the admin interface.

You will be able to purchase skins, or create your own, and then the Skins menu allows you to either edit the skin, or apply a different one.

The Skin Editor provides you with an interface for HTML and CSS editing in a drag-and-drop type interface. Here you can add, remove or rearrange elements of the site. So you can build the site by dragging and dropping the applicable page elements to the main section on the left of the screen.

Boxes plays into this concept where you can add additional page elements, or boxes to the editor so that you can drag them into the HTML editor. These effect the actual physical elements on the page.

Packages are CSS elements that allow you to edit your style preferences, which automatically generate the CSS for you. If you click on any of the packages, you get additional options for that package.

DIYthemes also offers a plugin that you can install which will allow you to play around with Thesis 2.0 on your site, without effecting the front end. This means, your current Thesis 1.x site will continue to show up as usual, but you can activate 2.0 and play with it.

That’s probably the best way to learn about many of the new features of Thesis 2.0. Just activate the theme, and start experimenting with the “Packages” and “Boxes.”

We’re likely going to see some great new Skins, Boxes and Packages available for purchase from both DIYthemes directly, as well as Skin shops like Kolakube, Thesis Themes and the upcoming ColorMob.

• Thesis 2.0 Launch Party Replay
• Installing Thesis 2.0
• How to Get Your Hands on Thesis 2.0

Chris Pearson of DIYthemes published an important post today about the upcoming, and long awaited Thesis 2.0.

The official release date of Thesis 2.0 is now October 1st, 2012. There are a lot of changes from Thesis 1.x, and Thesis 2.0 is a major update from all previous versions.

In terms of what’s new, well there seems to be a lot, but the two biggest in terms of updates to the overall Thesis architecture is something called “Boxes” and “Packages”, which are supposed to make it easier for folks to customize their themes.

Free Upgrade For Developer Licenses

If you already own a Developer License for Thesis, you will get Thesis 2.0 for free. If you don’t then you can upgrade for $77 right now, but once their new pricing kicks in, it will cost more. So if you own the Personal License right now, it makes sense to upgrade today before the price increase.

If you’re already a Thesis customer and wish to upgrade to a Developer’s Option, click here to buy the Developer’s Option add-on. You will need to log into your account and then upgrade from there.

You can learn more from the official post.

Thesis was updated to version 1.8.5 following the release of WordPress 3.4. In addition, Chris Pearson gave us an update on the status of Thesis 2.0.

What’s new in Thesis 1.8.5

Here are some of the updates in Thesis 1.8.5:

• Fixed theme preview in WordPress 3.4 for normal and multisite installations
• Improved multisite post thumbnail handling on a wider variety of server setups
• Resolved layout.css error message in multisite that appeared (wrongly) due to certain user permissions
• Updated the author microformat in post bylines so it passes the Google Rich Snippet Tool without any warnings
• Basic HTML tags are now allowed inside widget titles, so you have more presentational flexibility in those areas
• In previous versions, if you added a nav menu via a widget, it would display horizontally like the default nav menu. Now, menus added via widgets will display just like a normal vertical list of links, so you won’t have to waste time undoing undesirable styles.
• WordPress improved image captioning in version 3.4, and this affected the way Thesis displayed captions. In previous versions, we used a shortcode hack to get them to display properly, but thanks to WordPress 3.4, we no longer need that shortcode.

More News on Thesis 2.0

The most important news was that Chris Pearson has provided us with an August release date for Thesis 2.0! So we’re very excited about this and really looking forward to it.

You can read the full official post here.

• How To Install Thesis For The First Time
• How To Upgrade Thesis

A responsive skin for Thesis was recently released by everyone’s favorite Thesis ‘wiz kid’ Alex Mangini. It’s great to see that we now have a Thesis Skin and Child Theme specially coded to make your website or blog fully responsive.

What is Responsive Web Design

In a nutshell, a responsive website will adapt to the size of the screen you’re viewing it on. Typically certain elements of the page will be rearranged when viewed on smaller screens. For example, the sidebar might get pushed down below the main content, or the navigation will adjust so that it’s more readable.

Sometimes when viewing websites on an iPad or iPhone, I’d rather just see the whole site as it is supposed to appear on larger screens. So you may want to make the choice when you start out designing and building the site if you want to make it responsive or not. There’s an interesting article asking Why is Responsive Web Design Such A Big Deal? Seriously…You Tell Me. And you can google it for a lot more information if you’re interested.

Thesis Responsive Skin & Child Theme Starter

If you’d like to make your site responsive and you’re running on Thesis, you now have this resource available to you. You can read the official post over at DIYthemes, or here are direct download links:

Responsive Starter Skin

Responsive Starter Child Theme

In addition, Kolakube offers numerous Thesis skins as well as one that is fully responsive.

How to Make Your Existing Thesis Site Responsive

A word of caution here. If your Thesis site has extensive customizations, you will want to be careful about replacing the custom.css and custom_functions.php files. In fact, you must avoid doing this if those files have any custom coding for your site. Ideally you want to start with a fresh installation of Thesis and then replace these default files with the responsive versions from the download.

• Thesis Responsive Starter Skin
• Thesis Responsive Starter Child Theme
• Thesis Responsive Theme Demo
• Why is Responsive Web Design Such A Big Deal? Seriously…You Tell Me
• Wikipedia Article on Responsive Web Design

A new site dedicated to Thesis Theme designs has recently been launched. The goal of the new site, called HolyThesis.com is to spotlight some of the best Thesis sites out there.

Not every Thesis site will be listed. Only the very best in terms of design and function will be considered for inclusion. Visitors to the site can “like” their favorite designs, and also register to submit their own designs for consideration.

You can visit the new site at HolyThesis.com!

A common problem that you can experience when trying to upgrade or add a plugin automatically in WordPress is when WordPress cannot access the filesystem directly. It results in a message similar to this: “To perform the requested action, connection information is required.” WordPress requires you to enter your FTP information.

I discovered a few useful posts regarding this issue. Here is good one with an explanation on Why WordPress asks for this information by Chris Abernethy. And this post by Dion Hulse on WordPress File System Abstraction.

There are some solutions offered in these posts and they seem to have worked for some of the people who left comments. I tried a couple but they didn’t work for me, and the first solution offered in the first post I linked to seemed to create some sort of security issue.

Anyway, you may want to read the posts and even try some of their suggestions, but I ended up getting it resolved a different way that took a few seconds.

Solve WordPress Asking For FTP Details and Connection Information when Upgrading or Adding a Plugin

First off, I should thank Media Temple for helping me resolve the issue. In fact, this particular fix may be different depending on the web host you’re using, but my first recommendation is to simply call your web host as they will likely have a quick fix for you.

In a nutshell, the problem is caused because PHP runs as an Apache module by default. This means anything added to WordPress gets added as the Apache user, which your FTP user does not have access to. So there is a simple way to get around this, and that is to set PHP Support to run as FastCGI.

Now, if you’re running on Plesk, it’s easy to set this in your Plesk admin. Just click on “Websites and Domains” then click your domain in the list. Then just scroll down to PHP Support, and from the drop down menu, select “FastCGI Application.” Then save.

That’s it.

Now, if you’re using cPanel to manage your website, you would simply change your PHP to run on PHP5. You will log into your cPanel and click the PHP Config icon under software/services. Then select PHP5 (FastCGI) and click “Save Changes.”

Remember you can always call your web host to help you through this.

Good Luck!

• Why WordPress Ask For Connection Information
• WordPress Filesystem Abstraction

Wow, what’s happening here? Two Thesis releases within about a month. We like it! This time Thesis 1.8.4 improves support for WordPress Multisite and also fixed numerous bugs.

What’s nice too is the special bonus that was provided along with the release. If you’re a skin developer or regularly build custom sites for clients like I do, then the Thesis Skin Custom Functions Starter Template and Thesis Child Theme Starter Template will be helpful. These are starter files are basically just designed to help you keep you custom files organized when developing custom Thesis skins.

More information on the release can be found here: Thesis 1.8.4.

A reader of this blog posted a comment asking me to share the code that I’m using for the comment gravatar images. I’ve provided the code below, but keep in mind that you can always use Firebug to look at the CSS code used on elements of a website. I’m not saying you should copy code from other sites, but you can certainly get ideas and learn from other web developers as to how they achieve certain effects.

It’s really just CSS that was used to achieve the border and drop shadow effect, along with an image I had to create.

Now, you can certainly recreate that shadow effect using only CSS and that’s also an option for you. Here are two links to tutorials on that:

• CSS Drop Shadows Without Images from Nicolas Gallagher.
• Pure CSS3 box-shadow page curl effect from Matt Hamm.

Here’s my simple CSS code that I used for the avatar images on this site. Just add this to your custom.css file.

.custom span.avatar {
   background: url(images/shadow.png) no-repeat center bottom;
   float: right;
   height: 103px;
   margin-left: 10px;
   width: 86px;
}

.custom .avatar img {
    background: #FFFFFF;
    -moz-border-radius: 5px;
    -webkit-border-radius: 5px;
    border-radius: 5px;
    border: 1px solid #DDDDDD;
    padding: 5px;
}

Here is a link to the image file I used. If your avatar image on your site is not the same size then the shadow won’t work and you’ll need to create a new one, or you can just try out one of the CSS solutions I provided above. You can always adjust the avatar image size too.

Of course, you aren’t limited to this styling. You can get creative and style the comment gravatar images any way you want with CSS.

Chris Pearson has released the latest version of Thesis, version 1.8.3 which has numerous performance and usability enhancements.

To learn more about Thesis 1.8.3 and hear from Chris on the latest developments with regard to Thesis 2.0, you can read the official post over at DIYthemes.

How to upgrade from a previous version of Thesis
How to install Thesis for the first time

It took a while, but Thesis-Blogs.com now has a Twitter profile! Be sure to follow us to receive more tips for Thesis, WordPress and anything else we find interesting.

Follow @thesisblogs!