I’ve been doing a lot of website work this year. I specialise in WordPress based websites, using the Thesis theme framework. It’s a lot of fun and brings many many interesting challenges.
Buy Thesis through my affiliate link.
WordPress makes a great foundation for all kinds of websites, not just blogs.
Why WordPress works so well
Because WordPress makes it easy to create extra pages, link them in to a navigation menu automatically, manage images and other media files, it’s a great basis for any site.
Moreover it’s easy for a client (with some training) to log in and edit their own pages — fix a comma here, add a paragraph there, include an image. I know some people pay web companies big money even for little things like fixing typos in the text, and they often have to wait for the fix too.
With a WordPress site owners and their volunteers or staff can log in and fix things themselves.
WordPress is also extremely popular. There are millions of people around the world working with WordPress. If your web person leaves town or falls ill, there are plenty of other folks who can take over, offer training, or do the work.
Why Thesis works so well
The Thesis theme provides a very interesting framework for a site. I’ve found it operates at several levels.
At the simplest level anyone can check a few boxes and have a great looking site.
Choose the order of columns.
At the next level are people who get in to the custom stylesheet and change how a few things look. If you know some CSS you can tinker with colours or some simple aspects of the layout.
For the dedicated, though, Thesis offers endless scope to customise, by means of hooks, filters and functions.
Checkbox choices
The Thesis Site, Design and Page options give plenty of easy checkbox choices, along with sometimes dragging an item to a new location in a list to affect display.
For example, choose 1, 2, or 3 columns for your site from a drop-down menu, and then use a radio button to select which order the columns should appear in, as my screenshot shows.
Edit the styles
Enable custom.css in the Thesis options and then you can create custom styles that override the default Thesis styles.
This is a bit tricky at first, but once you discover Firebug it becomes much simpler. Read my article, Burn through web development with Firebug, for more about Firebug.
Every page on a Thesis themed site has at least one class added to the body. Most have a class called custom, while some have additional unique classes. That means that if you want to change the style of the header, for example, you create a CSS rule for .custom #header.
If I have a page with the slug contact-miraz (my Contact page) and want it to look different from any other page I can use rules like .contact-miraz #header. That would make the header on the Contact page different from the header on the rest of the site.
One small site I developed recently was customised by selecting Options and adding CSS: Dog Knows — personalised, customised training for dogs in the Wellington region, New Zealand. It’s a simple site of just a few pages. Even so, using Thesis cut development time in half.
PHP power
For the more advanced web developer who’s not afraid of PHP and HTML, Thesis allows endless opportunities to customise.
Tell us what you think.
Most of what I’ve been doing lately is confidential unfortunately, so I can’t even link to it. On several sites I’ve been developing highly customised pages, such as one where the first post on the Home page had to be full-width, the next few half width and then another couple of dozen had to be only a headline and link.
One site I’m working on at the moment needs about a dozen unique page templates, some calling in custom fields and custom entries in the User Profile.
I find myself frequently turning to the Thesis User Forums, Answers Blog and several other sources where I pick up snippets of code. Here’s an example.
Above the Comment form on most blogs is the text Leave a Comment. The following code goes in the custom_functions.php file:
<?php
function custom_comment_form_title($content) {
$content = str_replace('Leave a Comment', 'Tell us what you think.', $content);
return $content;
}
add_filter('thesis_comment_form_title', 'custom_comment_form_title');
I did not create this code, but I’m afraid I don’t recall where I picked it up from. It uses a filter to replace the text Leave a Comment with the text Tell us what you think. You’ll see I’ve used it on this blog, just above the Comments form.
I use Thesis because it saves me a lot of time, and because it’s powerful and flexible when it needs to be.
Version 1.7 of Thesis was just released. It brings some new features, including one real winner: I can export and import the Thesis Options. That means I can develop a site on my own secret test server and then easily transfer the settings to the real server.
I run my own websites on WordPress and Thesis. The more I use both of them, the more I like them.
Feel free to ask questions about Thesis in the Comments. And if you’d like to buy it, please use my affiliate link.
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