Thesis WordPress Theme

I LOVE Thesis. I’ve been using it for all of my websites for about 8 months now. In the past, each new website meant I had to search the ‘net for decent WordPress themes. Most of the themes I found were ‘okay’, but never exactly what I wanted. That all changed when I found Thesis.

The best part of Thesis is the amazing SEO. There are a bunch of features to help you increase your site’s SEO built right in. There’s also a great admin panel that lets you choose your site’s fonts, colors, navigation, and more. All built into Thesis!

Once you buy Thesis, you own it, and you get all the future updates for free! That includes the new 1.7.

Thesis 1.7

So back to the NEW Thesis… There’s a lot to be excited about in the new Thesis 1.7.

• Options Manager. My favorite part. I use similar templates for all of my sites, but I still have to go into Thesis and configure all of the options to make everything work. Not anymore! Thesis now has a way to have your options and import them into a fresh install. RAD.
• New headline filter - It used to take some CSS trickery to remove the headline, but now it’s built right in!
• Easy 301 redirects. Another of my favorite new features. I used to use a plugin called “Page Links To”, and now the same functionality built right in to Thesis!
• New SEO controls and detail. As if the SEO benefits weren’t already great, they’ve added even more. Features for robots tags, categories, and tags. Deep SEO stuff.
• Flexible new comment system – Gives you the ability to reorder comments, trackbacks, and the comment form.
• Completely reorganized options pages.
• Increased efficiency from every angle.
• Include a slew of JavaScript libraries.
• New home page controls – complete SEO control on your home page.
• New hooks
• Beefed-up internationalization
• Improved core element defaults
• Dramatically improved code quality

If you aren’t already using Thesis, I couldn’t encourage it more.  It’s saved me SO much time, and improved all of my sites.  Check it out!

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I’ve been converting most of my websites over to Thesis the last couple of months. There are a few little tweaks I’ve made along the way. I shared a few Thesis tweaks a while ago, I now I wanted to share some more of them.

Remove “Comments Closed”

You can turn off comments for individual pages or posts, but it still leaves the annoying “Comments are closed on this entry” at the bottom of the page. The following bit of code will remove that.

.custom .comments_closed p { display: none; }

There is also an option within the Thesis Options menu to disable comments on all pages. I think this will remove the line for any pages, as well.

Remove the “WordPress Admin” link from footer.

This isn’t a hook or CSS thing, it’s actually something you can do from your Admin Panel.
Go to These Options – Display Options – Administration – Show Admin Link in Footer.

Add Chitika After Posts

Most people have heard of AdSense, but not everybody has heard of Chitika.  Chitika is similar to AdSense, but it only appears when someone has used a search engine to find your site.

Basically, Chitika ads are invisible to your regular visitors, but are a great way to make money from Search visitors who are likely to bounce anyway.  Chitika Ads may not be huge earners, but you can use them along side AdSense for a little extra $.  Anyways, if you wanted to add them at the end of blog posts or pages, here’s the code to add to your custom_functions.php file.

/* Add Chitika */
function add_chitika () {
?>
<div align=”center”>ADD CHITIKA CODE HERE</div>
<?php
}
add_action(‘thesis_hook_after_post’, ‘add_chitika’);

Replacing Unordered List Bullet

I’m sure there are many ways to do this, but this is how I did it. You may not need the second line of code to pad the left side of the li elements, but I left it as a reference. Replace the URL with a link to your image file.

div#content ul { list-style-image:url(‘/_images/icons/bullet-white.gif’); list-style-position:outside; list-style-type:none; margin-left: 12px; padding:0 0 0 10px; }

div#content ul li {padding-left: 2px;}

Helpful Thesis Resources

http://myblog2day.com/60-thesis-themes-customization-tutorials.php

http://webstudio13.com/2009/10/19/71-best-tutorials-for-thesis-wordpress-theme-users/

http://mattflies.com/tech/100-resources-for-thesis-wordpress-theme-users/

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One thing I don’t love about the Thesis Theme for WordPress is the page headlines. Usually when creating static pages, I’d rather not have the page headings appear ( i.e. – Home, Contact, etc. ). They’re not always bad, but the “Home” one always annoys me, and is kind of a giveaway that you’re using WordPress as a CMS.

You don’t actually want to REMOVE the page headings, as they are actually pretty important from an SEO perspective, but there’s a great bit of CSS that will hide them from visual display. The h1 or h2 headlines still appear in your code, the headline is just not visible to people who visit your website.

Add the following code to your Thesis custom.css file.

.custom .headline_area { position:absolute; top:-1500px; left:-1500px; }

But there’s a catch. Removing the “headline_area” will remove the headline from every page on your site, including your blog posts. Since the blog headlines are important for site navigation, I ended up adding back in a bit of code that brings them back. I’m sure there are several ways to isolate the Blog headlines, but I used the “hfeed” class, since it is used for blog posts, but not regular pages. The following bit of code works to

.custom .hfeed .headline_area { left:0; position:relative; top:0; }

What if you only wanted to remove the headline area from one or two pages? This is easy enough to do, too. In this case, you just specify the class for the page you’re working with. In this case, my home page had an ID of “post-6″. Just replace “post-6″ with the ID of your specific page.

.custom #post-6 .headline_area { position:absolute; top:-1500px; left:-1500px; }

I don’t claim to be a master of CSS, by any means, but this code worked for me. This was all trial and error as I was working on a Cake website. Feel free to check it out to see these tweaks in action.

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A while back I put together a quick list of some of my favorite Plugins to install when you’re getting started with WordPress.  After spending some more time with WordPress, I have more I’d like to add to the discussion.  Most of these are pretty basic, and would be helpful for most blogs.

Useful WordPress Plugins

Contact Form 7 – A simple, easy to use contact form.  I’ve found that every site should have a Contact page, and this plugin makes that really easy to set up.

Easy AdSense – If you use AdSense on your site, this plugin is GREAT.  Instead of manually adding your code into places in your template, this plugin can add AdSense before, during, or after posts, in the sidebar, and even Google Search.

Yet Another Related Posts Plugin – This adds the area to the end of your posts that shows similar posts you’ve written that the reader may be interested in. If you don’t help people find good content, why would they stay on your site?

WP-SpamFree – An extremely powerful anti-spam plugin that virtually eliminates comment spam. Seems to work better than the other anti-spam plugins out there.

Possibly worth checking out…

I often find new plugins that seem great at first, but end up being pretty useless in time. Here are some I’m checking out right now that you may want to check out, too.

PS Disable Auto Formatting – Plugin is able to disable function auto formatting of your posts and pages.   Basically, it saves <p> and <br /> formatted content that would otherwise be removed by WordPress as unnecessary.

MaxBlogPress Ping Optimizer – Pinging is what notifies the different search engines and directories about changes to your site. Save your blog from getting tagged as ping spammer by installing this plugin. Also provides future post pings, and logging.

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This week was another web ‘first’ for me.  I moved this site to a new host!  It really wasn’t very complicated, but I ran into a few speed-bumps.  I’ll run through a few things I had to do.

There were 2 major obstacles for me.  First off, I’m running WordPress for this blog, and needed to move my posts, etc. to the new host.  Second, I needed to make the URL point to the new host, and not this old one.

Moving WordPress

First off – before you do anything else – back up EVERYTHING.  Back up the files on your host, your databases, settings… anything you can think of.  It’ll save you later if anything goes foul.

I had done some online research for ways of moving WordPress.  Some would have you create the exact database names, tables, etc. on your new host, but that seemed like a lot more work than I was interested in.  I decided to try the ‘easy’ way, first.  The easy way was simply to do an export from the WordPress Admin panel that can then be imported into a new WordPress installation.  You can do that by clicking Export under the Tools menu in your sidebar.  Once you’ve performed the export, you have a file that you can import in to a fresh WordPress installation that will restore all of your post content.  That covers your content, but you’ll also need to copy the folder with all of your media over.  You can find that at root/wp-content/uploads/.

That covers most of your content, but there are a couple additional things that’ll help you get your new install to match your old one.  First is plugins.  Back up all of your plugins to your local drive, then upload them to your new host.  Once they’re uploaded, you’ll just need to activate them from the admin panel.  Some of them will of course need some additional configuring.  Once your plugins are good to go, you have one last thing you may choose to do.  If you’ve used any Text widgets, you might want to copy the code out of them so you’ll have it for your new install.  This might include things like AdSense, graphics, etc.  I forgot to do this when moving my site, and it was a pain to recreate what I’d done previously…

Now that you’ve got all of your goods ready to use on your new install, you’ll need to install WordPress at your new location.  I’m switching from GoDaddy to Host Gator.  One of the best things about Host Gator is Fantastico De Luxe.  It’s kind of like cheating, it makes installing WordPress REALLY easy.  It handles the creation of a My SQL database and the process takes about a minute.  Now for the catch… you can’t get to your admin panel.  It’ll redirect to your current WordPress install on the old host.  It’s time to change the nameservers.

Changing Nameservers

There are probably ways to do this seamlessly, but I couldn’t find any — and I had the luxury of changing over a site that doesn’t get a ton of traffic.  A little down time was fine by me.

When you change the nameservers, you’re pointing your URL to the place where your website is hosted.  In my case I needed to point them to my new Host Gator installation.  You’ll find the nameserver addresses on your Host Gator control panel.  Once you have that info, go in to the GoDaddy Domain Manager.  Click on the domain you’re changing, and click Manage for the Nameservers section.  Add your two new Nameservers in the fields.  You’re done!  Now you wait.  This process can be quick… or it can take a while, up to 72 hours.  Check your site often to see if the change has taken place ( probably an hour or two ).  This is a good time to upload your Uploads folder, Plugins, and Theme so they’ll be ready.

Once you’re rerouted, get into your WordPress install and Import the file you Exported earlier.  Then install your theme and activate your plugins. Next check your settings – permalinks, blog address, number of posts shown, etc.  Check your site, you should be good to go!

I’ve read this method isn’t foolproof.  You can run into issues with links changing, etc.  If it doesn’t work, you may have to opt for one of the more complicated methods.  Cross your fingers, maybe you’ll get lucky like I was.

I’ll hit on it in the future, but if you need cheap, reliable hosting check out Host Gator.

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I’ve done enough reading to know that while the learning curve for the Thesis WordPress theme may be a little bit steep, it’s worth it in the end.  I’ve also read that once you ‘get’ it, it’s easy to make new changes in the future.

I’m still at the head scratching phase, but I’ll document some of my early learnings in the event that it may help somebody else at this phase in the process…  ( when this post was written, this blog wasn’t on Thesis yet – these changes refer to Outdoor-Game-Reviews.com )

Adding a header image.

I’ve found a couple of ways to do this.  I started off using method found on the Sugarrae site.  This got me up and running, and will work just fine, but I ended up making the transition to a CSS based method like the one on the Mattflies site.  The Mattflies way just involves added a few lines of CSS.

Remove Thesis Attribution

You’re only allowed to do this if you’ve purchased the Developer option, I think, but if you have… this is how to do it and add in copyright and privacy policy information.  Info also from the Sugarrae site.

remove_action(‘thesis_hook_footer’, ‘thesis_attribution’);
function add_custom_footer () {
?>
<p>© 2009 OGPN – All rights reserved. – <a href=”http://www.outdoor-game-reviews.com/privacy/”>Privacy Policy</a></p>

<?php
}
add_action(‘thesis_hook_footer’, ‘add_custom_footer’);

Remove the multimedia box

Not difficult, but I had a heck of a time figuring out how to remove the Multimedia box that contains rotating images by default.  In case you run into issues… it’s WP dashboard > Appearance > Design Options > Multimedia Box > Do Not Show Box

Moving the Navigation Bar

Just add the following code to the custom_functions.php file.

remove_action(‘thesis_hook_before_header’, ‘thesis_nav_menu’); add_action(‘thesis_hook_after_header’, ‘thesis_nav_menu’);

Plugins

I’m sure you have your favorite plugins, as I have mine.  Here are a few I’ve found helpful latey. ( Use the “Add New” search under the Plugins menu to find these )

Easy Adsense – let’s you place adsense wherever you want, and has great controls.

Contact Form 7 – gives you a really easy contact form to put on a contact page so you don’t have to give the world ( and spammers ) your email address.

Google XML Sitemaps – a big favorite of mine.  This creates site maps of your site as you add new pages.  Google will be able to index your site better, and you don’t even have to do anything.

PS Disable Auto Formatting – This one I just started using, but it’s been helpful.  When you’re creating pages using HTML, it can be really annoying when WordPress removes your paragraph tags or empty div’s.  Installing this plugin should stop wordpress from removing code that it finds ‘unnecessary’.

Basic CSS Tweaks for Thesis

The big “secret” when changing the CSS on Thesis is to use the custom class before anything you’re changing.  ( i.e. – .custom a:link )  As long as you include the .custom class, you should get the changes you want.  I use the Firebug plugin for Firefox a LOT when I’m playing with CSS.  It’s great to tell you what certain elements are, and where they’re grabbing their CSS elements from.

Changing the background.  I won’t go into it, but there’s a great tutorial on the DIYThemes site

Modernizing the Nav menu. Found GREAT information on this HowToMakeMyBlog.com article

That’s all I have for now, but there will be more.  I needed to keep track of all of this information for the next time I would need it, so I figured I might as well share these links and this information with anybody else who happens upon my site. Will be writing a LOT more about the Thesis Theme in the coming months!

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6 months ago I would have thought the idea of purchasing a WordPress theme was pretty inane.  I’m by no means a great designer, but I’ve been able to toss together sites, or tweak existing themes to meet my needs.

I recently learned of the Thesis Theme.  Turns out there are a LOT of blogs that are using the theme, but it’s so easy to change to suit your needs that it’s not always that obvious.  There are a few reasons that people give Thesis rave reviews.  I don’t need to go into details here, but I’ll note a few of my highlights.

My favorite thing about Thesis is that it gives you a bare bones site and lets you add or subtract from there.  Changing fonts, columns, and a bunch of other layout elements is easy, using your WordPress dashboard.  You can use the same template across several websites, and they can all look completely different!  The number of easy options that you can change through the dashboard is GREAT.

The other major thing you’ll read all about when learning about the Thesis Theme is the SEO.  The thesis theme is a really clean runnin’ wordpress theme.  They’ve stripped it down to be really friendly to Google and the other search engines.  I can’t vouch for that, necessarily, but I recently had a blog I created end up indexed on Google in under a week, coming in at #6 for the top keyword.  Impressive to me, considering I wasn’t even done designing the site yet.

The downside…  there is a steep learning curve for Thesis.  The use of “hooks” for design elements is one that you’ll have to learn about before you’re able to change your header, or move parts of the layout around.  Luckily there are a ton of tutorials on the ‘net to help you out, and I’ve been able to do anything I’ve needed to do so far.

Just a heads up, I’ll be writing quite a bit about Thesis in the upcoming weeks.  Just little things as I tweak and figure things out!

**NOTE** When this post was written, I this blog was not yet running Thesis. However, it is now! Almost every site I work with runs Thesis on WordPress. Use the dropdown menu at the top right of my blog to view some of my other sites.

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If you’re a rookie blog commenter, you might wonder how some people get custom icons next to their comments, while others do not.  It’s actually really simple!  Those little pictures are called Gravatars, a condensation of Globally Recognized Avatars.  A Gravatar is an avatar image that follows you from blog to blog, appearing beside your name when you comment on gravatar enabled sites.

To get your own Gravatar, all you have to do is create an account at www.gravatar.com.  Once you have an account, you can add multiple email addresses and assign different pictures to each one.  Once that’s done, go comment on a blog!  As long as you use one of the email addresses you registered through Gravatar.com, you’ll get an icon next to your comment!

This won’t work on every blog.  Some people turn off comment avatars, and some blog software doesn’t support it.  Most do though, and since it only takes a few minutes to do… just do it!

There are a few other reasons to get yourself a Gravatar.  If you comment on a blog, your avatar gives you an identity.  It can be your picture, your company logo, or a picture or graphic with special meaning to you.  Since your avatar will be consistant from blog to blog, it can show people in certain circles that you’re interested in what they have to say.  If you have your own website, it’s also a form of branding.  Commenting on blogs will occasionally compel people to visit your website.  Your avatar could be that extra bit that catches someone’s eye.

Links:

Register for a free Gravatar

The Gravatar blog

Instructions on using gravatars on WordPress.org

WordPress.com goes Gravatar Crazy

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By default, WordPress uses web URLs which have question marks and lots of numbers in them, however WordPress offers you the ability to create a custom URL structure for your permalinks and archives.

This is one of the first things you should do when setting up your WordPress pages. To many people, this would seem to obvious to mention, but since I completely forgot to do it when setting up THIS site, I wanted to throw it out there.

Permalinks are really easy to change, and will help you get better indexing from the Search engines. To set your URL’s, click “Permalinks” from the Settings menu. Your options are different combinations of the date and article name or the default setting. I went with a custom route to just include the article title, but not the date. I like the shorter URL, and I don’t feel that dating my articles is that important.

Remember to do this BEFORE you start writing articles. I just saw my pages indexed on Google with the default format. Probably not a big deal, but changing things now is going to break those indexed links. Feel free to learn from my mistakes!

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I’ve only been using WordPress for a short time.  I’m constantly finding new plugins that add great options and features.  I think part of the fun of having a blog is constantly adding new Widgets and Plugins.

When I started this site, I instantly installed several plugins to get me up and running fast.  In case this could someday help somebody else… here they are!

In no particular order…

Great Starter Plugins for WordPress

Askimet.  This one is obvious, and now comes with the WordPress install.  You’ll just need to activate it.

All in One SEO Pack – This one is great!  It helps you give all of your posts the proper metadata that you’d put on a normal webpage, like a Title, Description, and Tags.  It also manages your the titles of all of your other pages.  It’s really nice to have.

Google XML Sitemaps – This one creates a Sitemap for your site.  This is really helpful to get your site indexed by the search engines.  It also notifies Ask.com, Google, MSN Live Search and YAHOO about any changes or new posts.

Sociable – There are several options for icons, etc. to let others Share or Subscribe to your content.  I’ve tried a few, and this is my favorite.  It puts little graphics for the many Social Media sites across the bottom of your posts.  You can pick from a huge list of popular sites, then you can even reorder those to your liking.

WordPress Database Backup – This one just does what it needs to do.  It helps you back up your content on a regular basis.  It even runs on a schedule, so that you don’t have to remember.  Because, really, who remembers to back up their databases?  I wish I could find a phpBB plugin like this!

**Update** I’ve added a list of 6 additional plugins that are great when getting started with WordPress. Be sure to check them out, too!

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