Thesis 1.7 Theme Review – 5 Great Things About Thesis

No, this isn’t an April Fool’s joke. Thesis 1.7 came out of beta and was released to the public yesterday. I updated a couple of my sites, decided it was quite stable, and then updated the rest of my blogs. In the process I decided that there were a few things I really liked about this new release. In no particular order, here are 5 cool things that I love about Thesis 1.7.

The Need For Speed

Thesis Theme version 1.7 is faster than ever. Faster than Thesis 1.6, and faster than Thesis 1.5.

You’ll notice the speed improvement in two places: when someone visits your site and loads a page, and when you log into the Admin section of WordPress. How much faster is it? I’m really not sure. Chris Pearson said it was faster and I noticed it myself, but I didn’t do any stringent clock tests.

When I worked as a software engineer I focused a lot on writing clean, readable, updatable code. From the sounds of it Chris Pearson works the same way. He says the old Thesis code was kind of scary looking, and that he did a lot of code cleanup as part of Thesis 1.7. I’ll take him at his word. The result is the the file size of Thesis has shrunk, and it processes faster.

In fact, the size of the theme is now the smallest it has ever been. The geek in me loves to hear stuff like this. Faster, better, leaner, cleaner software – that’s the only way to build a foundation that lets you crank out more and more features without the whole thing collapsing into a pile of rubble.

Speed of execution is also important for SEO purposes. If your site is slow to load pages, Google won’t index as many pages, and won’t rank your pages as highly. And if you run Google AdWords, they’ll penalize slow pages there as well. So having your WordPress posts (and pages) load quickly is critical. Thesis knocks this one out of the park.

More Features, Better Organized

I think Thesis 1.7 is now pretty much feature complete in some areas, like SEO, font selection, font color, background colors, etc. Yes, there are still missing features, like an easier way to use the “Feature Box” hook, and easier header and footer control. But in terms of wrapping up the vision represented by earlier versions of Thesis, it looks like Pearson has left no stone unturned.

You now have control over SEO elements on every darn page you could possibly want them, for example. Even things like noindex, nofollow, and noarchive. And your images, teasers, and comments can all be tweaked with the click of a mouse. The result is that Thesis has a lot of options.

Did I mention that Thesis has a lot of options? And I do mean a lot! Fortunately, the developer didn’t just keep adding options willy-nilly. Pearson actually rearranged a number of them into better groupings to make it easier and more logical to find the option you want to change. So you get even more options, but they’re easier to keep track of and easier to manage.

Thesis Is Skintastic

Speaking of options, and how Thesis has a ton of them, it was starting to get to be rather painful to set up a new blog using Thesis because you had to manually set all your options the way you like them. This was time consuming and not the best use of anyone’s time.

Well, those days are over. The new Thesis 1.7 added the ability to export and import all your options, either broken out into groups (Site Options, Design Options, and Page Options) or as one collective group of All Options. So now you can set up multiple WordPress blogs by copying the look and feel from one Thesis blog to another. Or get your setup from someone else.

These pre-configured Thesis styles are known as “skins” among those in the business. And while Thesis skins have been around for a while, I think April 1, 2010 is going to be known as the unofficial birthday for the Thesis skins market. Because now a Thesis skin designer can deliver a single file to a customer that they can install with just a couple of clicks. And I think that ease of installation is going to allow the market for Thesis skins to really take off.

Thesis is a platform. It’s the foundation or skeleton. And while it looks good out of the box, Thesis has never really been about fashion. It’s been about building a strong base, providing proper functionality, making the search engines happy, and giving people the flexibility to do what they want without painting themselves into a corner.

All of which is great, but there are still users who want Thesis but don’t want the DIY aspects of it. They’d rather pay someone else to customize Thesis for them. Well, Thesis 1.7 makes that about as easy as it can get with it’s new options management feature. Or, as I like to say, Thesis is now “skintastic.”

Same Great Price

I really love that I got Thesis 1.7 for free. How did I do that? Well, when I bought the Thesis developer’s license a couple of years ago, it came with free upgrades for life. So every time a new release comes out, I’ve been able to download it and install it on all my websites. For free. No need to agonize over an upgrade price. No need to reevaluate every time Chris comes out with something new.

However, there have been hints that this way of selling Thesis won’t last forever. Rumor has it that Thesis 2.0 will have a higher price, and may not include lifetime updates and lifetime support. Until something official comes out from the DIY Themes folks, this is all speculation. But I think it’s safe to say that anyone considering buying Thesis might want to seriously consider getting Thesis 1.7, rather than waiting for Thesis 2.0 to come out and risk a price increase.

Clean Affiliate Links

Speaking of purchasing Thesis leads me to the last great thing I love about this new release – the ability to easily create affiliate link redirects (also sometimes called link cloaking) right within WordPress. As you no doubt recognize, I am a Thesis affiliate. So I get a commission when someone buys Thesis using my affiliate link.

An affiliate link is a specific URL that has identifying information that credits a particular affiliate. They tend to be long and ugly looking things.

Thesis now lets you create a page in WordPress (a Page, not a Post) with a pretty URL, like http://www.thesistheme.org/buy-thesis, that redirects to your long, ugly affiliate link behind the scenes (which usually then redirects to the merchant).

In this example I would create a page named “Buy Thesis” and then scroll down below the edit window (which I can leave blank) to the last field in the “SEO Details and Additional Style” section. The field is labeled “301 Redirect for this Page’s URL”. I simply paste in my ugly affiliate link and anytime someone visits my Buy Thesis page it will take them to the redirected page and then to the DIY Themes page.

Click on the link in that last sentence and you’ll see what I mean. And while you’re there, why not buy a copy of Thesis? It’ll help me deal with April 15. And that’s no joke either!