by Patrick O'Brien on March 9, 2010 · 1 comment
Thesis 1.7 Beta is expected to be released any minute now (tick, tock, tick, tock) to current owners of the developer’s license. While we’ve been waiting in anticipation, Chris Pearson leaked a few screenshots via Twitter that reveal some of the new features we can expect in Thesis 1.7.
Keep in mind that the final release will likely be different as Chris gets feedback from the beta testing community. Until then, here is a sneak peak at how things are shaping up. (Click on any of the screenshots to view a larger image.)
Thesis Site Options
The old Thesis Options page has been slimmed down a bit, reorganized a little, and renamed to the Thesis Site Options. These are all the settings that control the infrastructure and search engine optimization of the site as a whole, but not the look and feel of the elements of the site.
Thesis Design Options
This is where you set your fonts, colors, layout, and other visual elements of your site – its basic look and feel. The options on this panel have been reorganized a bit and extended to include JavaScript libraries and more control over comments and trackbacks.
The following JavaScript libraries will be supported out-of-the-box:
- jQuery
- jQuery UI
- Prototype
- script.aculo.us
- MooTools
- Dojo
- SWFObject
- Yahoo! User Interface (YUI)
- Ext Core
- Chrome Frame
The new JavaScript support is targeted at skin developers – folks who supply packaged customizations of Thesis known as “skins”. We’ve begun to see the development of a market for Thesis customizations and Thesis skins, and with the upcoming arrival of Thesis 1.7 we should see continued growth in this area, especially given this next beta feature.
Thesis Options Manager
Setting up a new Thesis blog is a bit tedious at the moment. Yes, there are a lot of options you can tweak. Unfortunately, there are a lot of options you can, and will, want to tweak. Wouldn’t it be nice if there was a way to copy your tweaks from one blog to another? Or purchase a custom set of tweaks (a “skin”) from another developer? Well, with Thesis 1.7 you will be able to do exactly that using the new Thesis Options Manager. As you can see in the screenshot, you will be able to download and upload Site Options, Design Options, and Page Options. Or, if necessary, you can restore any of these option sets back to their default values.
Thesis Page Options
The final addition, which was hinted at earlier, is a set of Options for pages. This is how you’ll be able to customize your Category and Tag pages, and apply specific search engine optimizations to each of these.
Is anyone else anxious to start using these new features?
by Patrick O'Brien on February 17, 2010 · 4 comments
This is a bit of an urgent post. The folks behind the Thesis Theme have released a new product, Scribe SEO, and are offering a reduced price, but the discount ends this Friday. Two days from now. So you need to act fast. [NOTE: You can relax a little bit. The deadline has been extended until Friday, February 26.]
Because of this short notice, I haven’t had time to do a full review yet. So I’ll just introduce the product and leave it up to you to decide if it is a good fit or not.
If you use Thesis, or are thinking about it, you probably are aware of its qualities when it comes to search engine optimization or SEO. In fact, Thesis 1.7 is supposed to allow you to customize just about every SEO element of every page of your entire blog.
And there is the catch. Thesis allows you to customize a bunch of elements. But what do you put into those elements, and how do you evaluate the contents of those elements, or the body of your blog post itself? Are you writing the right stuff, marking it up the best way, and including the proper metadata to please the search engines?
Scribe SEO could be the answer to all those questions.
Scribe is meant to appeal to web writers, bloggers, affiliate marketers, and entrepreneurs. At its most basic level Scribe is a WordPress plugin that you use to evaluate a page or post, directly within the WordPress environment, which I think is extremely clever and convenient as you can tweak your post and evaluate the SEO effectiveness of your changes without having to go out to an external tool. That tight feedback loop is bound to do a better job of improving your feel for what it takes to write optimized content. (Future plans include a web-only approach as well as support for Joomla, Drupal, Moveable Type, and even Microsoft Word.)
Scribe provides feedback on your existing content, giving you insight into how the search engines will evaluate what you have written. For example, the search engines might see that you have given more emphasis to an insignificant keyword than you realized. In other words, you think the emphasis of your post is on subject X, but the search engines think the emphasis is subject Y. By applying suggestions from Scribe, you can tweak your content to place the right emphasis from the search engine perspective, resulting in better rankings for the keywords you care about, and more traffic to your blog.
In other words, Scribe is a bit different than a lot of other SEO tools. Rather than starting with a keyword to build content around, Scribe starts with your existing content and helps you discover how to optimize it for one or more keywords. Now, both types of tools have their place, but Scribe definitely fills a gap in the SEO landscape.
There are a lot more details provided on the Scribe website so I’m not going to repeat them all here. I just want to end by mentioning the introductory discount. “Until February 19, 2010, at 6:00 pm Central you get the Advanced plan for the Starter price – only $27 per month (and you keep that price for as long as you stick with Scribe).”
I look forward to hearing from early adopters. Let me know what you think of Scribe while I work on an in-depth review.
