Alright, so Thesis Theme 1.6 Beta has been released. This is pretty big news, and there are some big changes.
First of all- If you want to get a copy of the Thesis 1.6 Beta, you have to own a thesis developers license. It’s not available to personal license holders yet, though if you have a personal license you can pay the little extra for an upgrade. So you’ll want to upgrade or get a developers license to see what all the fuss is about.
From the Thesis Theme Developer’s Blog:
This is the release that was never supposed to happen. Back in June, I began working on what I eventually dubbed Thesis 2.0, so I had no reason to believe we would ever see a Thesis 1.6. But then, a funny thing happened…
I dove into the 1.5.1 core files to solve a little problem with post image and thumbnail frames, and I got a little carried away. Next thing you know, I’m tweaking nav menu colors directly from the Design Options and dropping teaser images on Twitter.
Who knew image framing was so complex?
Anyway, now that you know how we got here, let’s see what we’ve got here. New hotness you’ll find in Thesis 1.6:
- Oodles of design and color options! Control font colors all over the theme. Experiment with your background color. Customize the daylights out of your nav menu. Tweak all freakin day.
- Automatic dropdown nav menu! Bring your parent-child pages or your nested categories, and Thesis will turn them into a killer new CSS-only dropdown navigation menu. Best of all, Thesis allows you to customize the anchor text of all your pages, so you can tailor your nav menu to your specific needs. Also, don’t miss the new nav menu design controls on the Design Options page! You’ll find ‘em under the Fonts, Colors, and More! section, and seriously—you’re gonna love ‘em.
- Custom file editor in your WordPress dashboard: Sick of dealing with an external file editor and an FTP client every time you need to update that damned
custom.cssfile? Not anymore, ’cause now you’ve got a custom file editor inside your WordPress dashboard that totally solves this problem! WIN.- New options placement in the WordPress dashboard: Instead of existing inside the Appearances section, the Thesis Options now have their own dedicated module in the WordPress dashboard menu. Sadly, the options are relegated to the bottom because the native WordPress function used to hook them into place doesn’t do all of the things it purports to do (like positioning the new module). Meh.
- IE-only styles are now cache-friendly: Version 1.5 included a CSS-based method of serving IE-specific styles, but this method proved to have one fatal flaw—it didn’t play nicely with caching techniques (and especially the WP Super Cache plugin). Because of this, I reverted back to using conditional HTML in the document
<head>, and now caching is money.- Fixed post image and thumbnail frames: These actually work now. Special.
- Suppressed warnings on all
getimagesizefunction calls: This PHP function has been known to trigger warnings on certain server configurations, and suppressing warnings will radically reduce the annoyance factor in these situations.- Moved the
/rotatorfolder into the/customfolder: Can somebody tell me why the/rotatorfolder, whose very existence suggests customization, was not located inside the/customfolder from the very beginning? Sigh. Fixed.Bold prediction: You will use the new Design Options in Thesis 1.6 more than you’ve ever used any other Thesis options to date. In fact, it’s quite likely that you’ll find them to be highly addictive, so proceed with caution (and bring your creativity)!
I’ve got to say that I like Thesis a lot more than Headway, but it sure is good for us users when they battle it out.
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{ 4 comments… read them below or add one }
Thanks for the info on Thesis….How can I contact you directly about SEO work?
Hey there..
What do you see as the main benefit of working with a theme framework such as Thesis? I never liked the lack of flexibility, and hard-coding in the theme, but I guess I am not their target market.
Interested in your thoughts..
You know I’ve been meaning to do a post about this for a while, but it’s just such a big subject I don’t know how to approach it.
First off, I used to feel the same way.
But it turns out that well coded themes like Thesis are even more flexible then their counterparts. It comes down to CSS’s Display-None and the fact that each of the widgets, sections, everything in thesis has a different CSS ID that you can style to your hearts content. So you just plug into thesis your number of columns, typogrpahy, and then start CSS-ing (and Open-hooking) your theme to all hell breaks loose.
It’s really a lot of fun,
It would have been even cool for thesis theme to have something that’ll move all the meta data that All in one SEO plugin had supplied into thesis. Since this needs some My SQL queries which everyone isn’t (and this is what thesis actually says ‘no coding work’) sure about.
Any one who has hundreds of posts on a different theme and want’s to move to thesis without looking the SEO stuff has to run these queries right?