20 Top Thesis Forum Threads & Tools For Customizing Thesis

Chris Pearson - creator extraordinaire of Thesis Theme - and his team over at DIY Themes have provided code snippets and detailed explanations to help you customize your blog.
Special thanks to the Thesis user community for providing links to your sites to demonstrate your success.

 

 

20 Top Thesis Forum Threads & Tools to Help You Learn About:

• Customizing with hooks
• Thesis OpenHook plugin
• Clickable header images
• Replacing your sidebar headers with images
• Background images and slideshow integration
• Replacing rotating images with a block of ads or several images
• Popular widgets and plugins including Photo Dropper for Flickr
• Moving your navigation bar to below the header
• Repeating a background image
• DIYtheme Answers
• Thesis User’s Guide
• Thesis Development site
• WWW Consortium
• Thesis Forum Help
• Blogging Inspiration
• Wowzio Widgets
• Marketing and Affiliate Programs

1. Customizing with Hooks

Recent versions of the Thesis Theme use the hooks function. This Thesis Forum thread teaches you the basics and has a fantastic screenshot with markups that speaks a thousand words.

2. Thesis OpenHook Plugin

If you are smart (and cheat and do it the easy way) you will install the Thesis Open Hook plugin and just copy and paste code you get from tutorials from the Thesis Forum or other Thesis Community sites (like this one!).
Thesis OpenHook is a plugin that will allow you to fully customize your Thesis installation without touching your custom/custom_functions.php file unless you just really want to!
OpenHook adds a new panel to your administration panel’s Design area — in addition to Thesis Options & Design Options, OpenHook creates a new Thesis OpenHook panel.
Here is a screenshot below showing a portion of the very long options panel (something for virtually every part of your Thesis Theme).

3. Clickable Header Images

Instead of just displaying your Site Name in words, display a beautiful graphic banner (Hint: like the one on this site). Design your banner and then follow the guidelines in this Thesis Forum thread to make your header clickable. Then, when somebody clicks on your header banner, they will be taken to your home page.

4. Replace Your Sidebar Headers with Images

This Thesis Forum thread shows you how to create some great images and replace your standard sidebar titles with eye-catching graphic buttons like the ones on Billy Squire’s Woody Tone

5. Background Images & Slideshow Integration

Check out this Thesis Forum thread about  using a background image. Within this forum is a gem about integrating a slideshow and what plugin the Fuse Box Theatre Company uses.

6. Replacing Rotating Images With A Static Block Of Square Ads

Check out this Thesis Forum thread to replace your multimedia box with ads or a couple of other images linking to your best content perhaps?

Some great examples:

7. Popular Widgets & Plugins

This Thesis Forum Thread is updated regularly by members of the Thesis user community.

I use the following on a regular basis:

Akismet - checks your comments against the Akismet web service to see if they look like spam or not. You need a WordPress.com API key to use it. You can review the spam it catches under “Comments.”

Breadcrumb NavXT - Adminstration Interface - Adds a breadcrumb navigation showing the visitor’s path to their current location. This enables the administrative interface for specifying the output of the breadcrumb trail.

Broken links Remover - Eliminate Broken links

Category Posts Widget - Adds a widget that can display a specified number of posts from a single category.

cforms - cformsII offers unparalleled flexibility in deploying contact forms across your blog. Features include: comprehensive SPAM protection, Ajax support, Backup & Restore, Multi-Recipients, Role Manager support, Database tracking and many more.

Configurable Tag Cloud - A tag cloud plugin for Wordpress 2.3 to give you more flexibility with the styling of your tag cloud. Currently in use on my Archives page.

DoFollow - Selectively disable the “nofollow” tagging for comments. Share you link love with your visitors.

FD Footnotes - Elegant and easy to use footnotes

Featured Content Gallery - Used to create a fully automated featured content gallery anywhere within your wordpress theme.

Google XML Sitemaps - This plugin will generate a sitemaps.org compatible sitemap of your WordPress blog which is supported by Ask.com, Google, MSN Search and YAHOO.

Maintenance Mode - Adds a splash page to your blog that lets visitors know your blog is down for maintenance. Logged in administrators get full access to the blog including the front-end.

MaxBlogPress Ping Optimizer - Saves your wordpress blog from getting tagged as ping spammer. Great if you edit and re-save frequently.

p2pConverter - This plugin allows you to easily convert a post to a page and vice versa through an easy to use interface.

Random Redirect - Allows you to create a link to yourblog.example.com/?random which will redirect someone to a random post on your blog, in a StumbleUpon-like fashion. You can also specific in the URL `random_post_type` or `random_cat_id`. Try it out by clicking on the “Random Post” tab in the nav menu at the top of this site.
Rotating Posts - Easily create customizable rotating posts like those seen on popular news sites.
Thesis OpenHook - This plugin allows you to insert arbitrary content into the many hooks that the Thesis Theme Framework provides. Never again edit a file!
Thumbnail For Excerpts - Thumbnail For Excerpts allow easily, without any further work, to add thumbnails wherever you show excerpts (archive page, feed…). Simply activate and it picks up the first image for each article and displays it in your archive pages.
TinyMCE Excerpt - Use Tiny MCE for the excerpt while editing the excerpt. Basically gives you additional editing options in your excerpt field, e.g. italics, color, etc.
Widget Logic - Control widgets with WP’s conditional tags is_home, is_single(), when you only want a particular widget to appear when a full post is displayed for example, or only on the home page.
WordPress.com Stats - Tracks views, post/page views, referrers, and clicks. Requires a WordPress.com API key. Great alternative to paying for cPanel statistics if you don’t have them for free with your web hosting. And even if you do have stats on your server, this is an easy option to have a quick look at popular posts, visitor numbers, links in, links clicked out, etc. You can also add more than one site and see the stats for all of them in the one dashboard. You just use the dropdown box to display stats for your other sites. A real time saver.
WP YouTube - WP YouTube allows you to control all the YouTube videos at the same time. This is one of my favourites. All you need is the YouTube video id e.g. yu73485h838 and you insert it using a profile you set up. What you insert where you want the video in the sidebar, post, etc is something like this [yep]yu73485h838[/yep] and voila! The selected YouTube video appears on your page without using your server space. You can customize the look as well. Check it out on one of our other sites Wolf Howl videos on Timberwolf HQ.com.
Yet Another Related Posts Plugin - Returns a list of the related entries based on a unique algorithm using titles, post bodies, tags, and categories. Now with RSS feed support!. Also one of my favourites. YARRP delivers the related posts at the end of articles on our sites.

8. Move Your Navigation Bar to Below The Site Header

Customize the look of your site with this simple customization. This Thesis Forum thread shows you how.

Examples of navigation bar below site header:

Example of navigation bar above site header (standard default):

9. Repeating Background Image

This Thesis forum thread shows you how to repeat a background image.

10. DIYtheme Answers

DIYthemes Answers offers… “Thorough Answers to Common Tasks with the Thesis Theme”.
This is a selection of advanced tips once you have already installed Thesis Theme on your blog and you want to get into customizing. Article topics include:

• Modifying text
• Styling drop caps
• Filtering posts by category
• Inserting ad after content
• Customizing post bylines
• Creating pullquotes
• Styling nav menu tabls
• Adding separate nav menus for categories
• Moving or replacing nav menus.

11. Thesis User’s Guide

Thesis is equipped with styles and options that you can use to enhance your site. Check out the user’s guide for crucial tips, tutorials, setup information, and more!

12.  Thesis Development Site

This is the place to go to find out when the next version of Thesis Theme is due out and what is happening behind the scenes. Even if you aren’t a programmer yourself, it is interesting to read what is going to be included in the next version, what tweaks and upgrades have been made, what bugs have been found and destroyed.

13.  Thesis Theme Skins

DIYthemes is offering a FREE DOWNLOAD of a Thesis Theme Skin called “Minimal”. Only for users of Thesis Theme.

14. Photo Dropper Plugin

The Photo Dropper plugin helps you properly attribute photos from Flickr in your blog.

15. World Wide Web Consortium

Two very useful features of the W3C site are the CSS Validator and the HTML Validator. Read our article  World Wide Web Consortium Helps You With Your Code for more information.

16. Thesis Theme Forum Help

Help at Thesis Forum is free. You simply post your question or questions and wait for an answer. If somebody has a code solution, you are welcome to copy and paste and see how it goes. To understand how to get the most out of this wonderful free resource, read Free Technical Support For Thesis Theme & WordPress.

17. Blogging Inspiration

Read some of our inspiration articles:

• 20 Great Examples of Customizing Thesis and 20 Mini Site Reviews
• Dream A Dream Of Blogging With Susan Boyle
• Lindsay Lohan Inspires Blogging Excellence

18.  Wowzio Widgets

I am a fan of Wowzio widgets. Read my article 10 Reasons Why You Should Try Wowzio Widgets On Your Blog/Site.

After writing this article I had an unexpected pleasant surprise, read Use Unsolicited Reviews To Get Free Traffic To Your Site to find out what it was.

19. Marketing & Affiliate Programs

We write articles relating to marketing strategy and products from time to time. We also cover affiliate programs that we feel are reputable and relevant to creating a successful website/blog. Here is a selection:

• Affiliate Program: Thesis Theme for Wordpress

• Review: Super Affiliate Handbook
• The Resource Report: FREE DOWNLOAD
• Don’t Let Your Potential Customers Forget About You
• Review: AN Hosting For Cheap and Reliable WordPress Hosting
• 5 Step Google Profits Success Formula

• Negative Review: Get Google AdWords Pay-Per-Clicks FREE

20. Buy Thesis - The Premium Theme for WordPress

If you haven’t bought Thesis Theme yet - Get Thesis now!

If you want to know more about Thesis Theme before you buy - read our Review of Thesis Theme for WordPress.

If you want more than one Thesis Theme site I recommend you buy the Developer’s Licence for an extra $77 or upgrade. You can then create unlimited sites using Thesis and make them all unique.

Share Your Favourite Thesis Forum Threads

What threads did you find particularly useful when customizing your Thesis Theme Site?

Add the link with a brief description in the comments below.