Life

I’ve been asked about the Thesis theme for WordPress now and again so here are a few words why I’m a fan of Thesis.

Yup, I am a fan of the Thesis WordPress theme. I was a little apprehensive paying for a WordPress theme since there are good ones freely available. I forget the exact reason why I went with Thesis, but I’m glad I did. I think it was reading through the Thesis docs and user guide that convinced me. Or it might have been the many sites that started using Thesis as well.

Why Thesis? It’s easy. Plain and simple. Many of the common customizations of blogs can be done with some CSS knowledge. With Thesis, you don’t necessarily need to know CSS, even for somewhat complex customizations since they are all configuration items of this theme. What to show, what not to show, how to show it (font, size, etc) are all controllable by Thesis via checkboxes, drop down menus, etc. Thesis has defined styles for notes, alerts, drop caps, and frames around images to make your stuff look good without having to figure out the CSS.

Thesis makes common changes easy to implement. It has dedicated sections for adding scripts in the header and footer. You can change your RSS syndication feed to Feedburner for example. I know these are not hard changes to make, but Thesis puts these common options right in front of your face.

There’s a plugin called Thesis OpenHook that makes placement of items on a blog even easier. Thesis has these defined hooks where you can stick code/text. With OpenHook, it better exposes these defined areas so you can place items exactly. For example, there’s placement for Before Header, After Header, Byline, Before Sidebars, Before Sidebar 1, After Sidebar 1, etc. so you can easily place a Google Adsense ad, images, or anything else you can imagine.

Lastly, the Thesis support forums are actually good. There’s a lot of activity and really helpful people. If you have questions, issues, or want to know how to do it in Thesis, it’s probably covered in the forums already.

Oh yeah, the Thesis creator, @pearsonified, is on Twitter and frequently points out 3rd party mods and changes to Thesis, so you can see how others are using this theme.

I’m sure I missed something describing Thesis, but for me, Thesis is the ONE thing that got me off of Blogger and on to WordPress full time. I was always looking for a solid theme to start Pulpconnection on WordPress, and once I started with Thesis, I got so far so quickly there was no turning back.