My First Thoughts with Thesis

I have written about my curiosity with the Thesis theme for WordPress before and I’ve finally purchased a developer license for it. Here are some thoughts…

My thoughts regarding a fresh install of WordPress and Thesis 1.4.2.

Yesterday I purchased and installed Thesis theme for WordPress (WP) on one of the sites I’ve recently started. A few months ago I had installed WP 2.6 for one site and then abandoned work on it for a while. This month when I went back to it, and decided to upgrade to WP 2.7. Well, because I didn’t really know what I was doing before (possibly because I changed some default settings) the blog is no longer reachable.

Not a problem. I’ll fix it later.

In the meantime, I had another project I wanted to get started on so I installed WP 2.7 and Thesis 1.4.2 and got going. Here’s how it went…

When I first tried switching to the thesis them, I received a strange error message when previewing it:

Cannot load thesis-design-options.

Odd. I tried searching the forums, but I’m still not familiar with the layout so didn’t find anything right away, and I was quite impatient. I was trying to do all this while at work and I had important stuff I should have been doing… stuff I get paid for.

Anyway, I had looked over the installation instructions for WP a few times and had seen some references to setting permissions on certain files while I was troubleshooting the problem on the original site. One suggestion is to make sure to set the permissions on the cache file to 777. This means doing something technical on the Unix server, but luckily I use Dreamweaver to upload my files to the host. This folder is in the wp-content\themes\Thesis\custom folder in your WordPress installation.

Here’s how to change the permissions on a file in Dreamweaver:

Make sure you are vewing the remote files on the server.
Right-click the cache folder choose Set Permissions. It allows you to enter 777 directly into the box (or any other permissions required), or add the appropriate rights as required.
Click OK.

Unfortunately, that doesn’t seem to work with my web host (GoDaddy).

Fortunately, it turns out I could still activate the theme, so no harm, no foul. Just a tad annoying.

After loading it, I noticed in WP press administration I now had “Design Options” and “Thesis Options” in the WP Appearance menu.

I’m still new to WordPress, but I found the Thesis configuration really easy. There are lots of options and a very hand big ass save button!

On the Thesis options page, even the text on the button can be altered. Talk about customization!

I was particularly impressed with the contextual help of the options screen. Beside the heading titles appears a small [+] symbol. Clicking on it creates a fold-down with a short description of what that section can do. Clicking it hides the text again. Very smooth without the need for popups.

Here is the default Thesis theme:

I had read about a magazine layout coming in Thesis 1.5 that I might use for this site, but for now I wanted to switch to a 3 panel layout. Starting with the Design options, I was very easily able to switch to a 3-column format with the sidebars on either side. I may be oldschool, but its what I wanted for this particular site.

There were so many settings to play with, but basically I wanted to change the background colour and text colour. That I could do by going directly to the Editor screen in the WP Appearance menu. This does require knowledge of Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) but even if you don’t know much about those, it was easy to find the body tag and change my font and background colour.

Oops! The fine print says don’t make changes to that stylesheet in the editor. Good idea. The Thesis theme contains a panel for creating a custom stylesheet called custom.css which is stored in the thesis\custom folder.

After a bit of playing…

Now things look a lot better! Tracking down the style/colour for the header was a bit of work, but I got that back, so now all I need to do is find the colour for text posts and the comment number and we can start some major work. And then there is customizing the sidebars and changing the images in the rotator….