For those of you who’ve been swaying back and forth about the thesis theme, let me tip you over to the thesis side:
After starting this blog I’ve tried a handful of different themes, but have never been really satisfied. I mean what’s the point of having a theme if you have to manually go into the code “editor” again and again to make simple custom changes (so stupid).
The worst part is when you’ve done a little bit of custom work and then decide to change themes for a different “look and feel”. WordPress changes the current theme to the new theme directory and you basically have to customize all over again, or reference your previous theme and track down all your custom work. And, if the theme you were using gets an upgrade, don’t even think about upgrading, you will wipe out all your work.
Now the thesis theme is a little different. The theme is basic in its design, so you won’t get a revolutionary look and feel change like you might with other themes, but thesis will be less painful to customize (and trust me, everyone always wants to customize). And, because it’s easy to make changes, you can custom build your site however you like, plus you won’t break your upgrade path.
Have a look at the thesis UI, these are all the things you can customize without ever ever having to use a code editor.
Thesis Options:
Thesis Design Options:
{ 6 comments… read them below or add one }
“The worst part is when you’ve done a little bit of custom work and then decide to change themes for a different “look and feel”. WordPress changes the current theme to the new theme directory and you basically have to customize all over again, or reference your previous theme and track down all your custom work.”
- This is my favorite thing about having Thesis! You don’t have to worry about having to make all of your custom edits to the core code.
Now if only somebody could design a Magento theme that would accomplish what Thesis does, we’d be set.
I was on the fence with Theme Frameworks for clients. It’s a fine balance between not enough options, and too many options. I’ve worked with Thesis, and stripped it down to some essentials. Nice blog!
I am getting into using WordPress more and more, both for personal site development as well as for clients at Hitch Creative. Sometimes too many options can definitely be overwhelming, at first glance Thesis provides an added layer of customization.
However like any CMS its still kinda technical, there always seems to be a learning curve if the person administrating the site is not a technical person. We are still evaluating the benefits of using Thesis for custom site development over simply creating a custom theme. As I do a little bit more development with Thesis, I should have a better idea on whether its worth it for custom site development.
No Doubt. There are so many great features embedded in it. I just stripped out a few of the superfluous ones. Everyone has a different approach to it, but I try to give clients as little chance of messing up the design as possible. I go so far as to turn off half of WP’s admin settings. I liked your post on your meta boxes. I used some of your css from your example! WP3 is going to make it so easy to put meta boxes throughout post types.
Ya, I’m definitely looking forward to WP3, the custom menu management is going to be really nice.
In Thesis, thats one of the features I do like (being able to add pages, categories and links to the nav menu, for clients this is superb)… my only gripe with it, is that you can’t order them all as a whole, meaning: after you’ve picked your pages, categories and links then do your ordering… I can order the pages, thats nice, but what if I want a category link before a page link… there are work-arounds but this area can be improved.
You should check out the Woo THemes navigation: http://www.woothemes.com/2010/01/the-awesome-custom-woo-navigation/
They crushed it.
Best part is, Wordpress 3.0 is going to include it in the core or as a plugin if they don’t finish it in time.
http://wordpress.org/development/2010/02/menus-merge-patch-sprint/