Thesis Theme

This is a story about the second time I used the Thesis theme from DIYThemes.com to build this site. The first time I built the WordPress version of this site ended in a tragic loss of the site and all its content when I tried to move from /wordpress/*.* to the root directory. The second time went much more quickly because I had already figured out how to use Thesis.

(Note:  this article was written using Thesis 1.5.  New buyers get version 1.6, which may change a few of the steps.)

Here are the steps I followed, after I stumbled through once:

  1. Buy hosting for a WordPress install, and make sure that WP is installed at the root, if that’s where you want your site to be.
  2. Buy Thesis from DIYThemes.com. (Follow the user guide at DIYThemes for these instructions in their terms.)
  3. Unzip Thesis on your hard drive and FTP it to www.yoursite.com/wp-content/themes.
  4. Log into the admin panel for your site, go to Appearance / Themes and activate Thesis.
  5. Rename wp-content/themes/thesis_15/custom_sample to */custom. Make sure the Custom Style sheet is selected in Thesis Options.
  6. Install the Thesis_Open_Hook plug in. (Other useful plugins, available from WordPress, are the Better Blogroll and Widget_Logic. You might as well get them at the same time.)   Get Thesis Open Hook from Rick Beckman’s site.  Activate whichever plugins you select from the WP Plugins/Installed panel.
  7. You’ll save a lot of time if you go ahead and install the Firebug plugin to your Firefox browser. Tools/Add-ons/Get add-ons. Firebug allows you to look at the HTML/CSS that drives websites, so you can see how someone wrote a particular part of their site. Kristarella has a nifty video of how it works on the Thesis site.
  8. Now that you have Thesis Open Hook installed, go back to the User Guide and start tweaking the appearance of your site. The User Guide contains pretty straightforward instructions for changing the background color of your site and for moving the navigation tabs to below the header block, if those changes appeal to you. Thesis_Open_Hook allows you to make these changes directly in your WordPress Admin, rather than making them on your hard drive with a text editor and uploading them to your site to see if they worked. (If you know your *.css/*.php changes will always work, you know enough about WP to not need these steps in the first place.)
  9. The support forums provided a bit of css to turn the “no comment comment” off: .comments_closed p { display: none; }
  10. Use text widgets to fix content in sidebars. The widget_logic plug in allows you to fix a particular text_widget to a particular page (or group of pages; that code is beyond me so far).
  11. It’s pretty tricky to resize the multimedia box, and it always displays at the top of a sidebar unless you’re really good at writing code. If you want to stick an image somewhere <> the top of a sidebar, write the image code in a text box.
  12. Once you’ve made it this far, you can find information about most tweaks somewhere in the support forums. What ate time for me the first time around was figuring out where all the “parts” were and what was the order of service. The second time around, I had the site done in about 4 hours, compared to 20 hours the first time. YMMV.

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