Thesis Theme 1.2 Revealed

In a previous post (What Are My Thesis Theme Options?) I showed the options screens you can use to customize the Thesis Theme for your blog. In this post, which is the first of a series, I’m going to dive into more of the details for each of these options. And I’m going to reveal the new ones that were added in the Thesis 1.2 release.

As we saw before, there are two options screens available in the Admin interface of WordPress that can be used to customize the Thesis Theme: Thesis Options and Design Options. Rather than show you the entire page for these screens, I’m going to show you individual elements and explain how they are important to your blog.

Design Options Admin Page

Design Options didn’t change much since the last release. You can still set your overall blog layout from 1 to 3 columns (this blog is set to 2 columns). After you set the number of columns, you can select the size of each column. (The only option you do not have is a sidebar column to the left of the content area.) And you can specify the font and size to use for all the various elements that make up a blog page. This screen shows a partial display of these options:

I did notice a few subtle changes in the 1.2 release, such as the use of an asterisk to identify web-safe fonts among the list of available fonts. That’s the sort of attention to detail that sets this theme apart. And the sense of humor in things like the “Big Ass Save Button” (the name of which you can also customize).

Here is the full list of elements for which you can change the font and font size: 

• Body
• Content Area
• Sub-headlines
• Navigation Menu
• Header
• Tagline
• Headlines
• Bylines and Post Meta Data
• Multimedia Box
• Sidebars
• Sidebar Headings
• Footer

Thesis Options Admin Page

There were a lot of additions to the Thesis Options page in the Thesis 1.2 release. Let’s look at some of these options. In case you thought I was kidding about customizing the “Big Ass Save Button,” let’s look at that one first.

Big Ass Save Button

From what I can gather, Chris Pearson has an interesting sense of humor. One aspect of this that caught everyone’s attention early on was the naming of the “Save” button for Thesis Theme changes.

Of course, Chris also lets you change the name of the Save button, but he doesn’t recommend that you do so. Funny guy, eh?

Title Tag Display Options

Changing how your page titles are constructed can influence your search engine optimization. The basic idea is that you want important keywords to appear early in your title text.

If your tagline contains important keywords (and it probably should) you’ll likely want the tagline to appear before your site name. And since your site name might not be a meaningful keyword itself, you might not want it to appear on individual page or post titles. In the case of this blog, the site name is relevant so I do append it.

Publishing Display Options

Most blogs will want their title and tagline to appear in the header of each post, but you can turn those off if you like.

Byline information can be altered in a number of ways. I keep mine simple and include only the published-on date. If you have multiple authors on your blog you’d want to include author names. Page bylines can be changed independent of post bylines.

Getting visitors to read the entirety of your posts is important. The question mark link next to this option takes you to an article that describes the alternatives you might want to consider. The default continuation text is “[click to continue…]“, and I have changed mine to read “[Click here to continue reading…]“.

When readers are on a single post, you have the option of displaying links to the previous and next post in chronological order. These links appear at the very bottom of the page, after the comments and comment entry fields. Here is an example of what they look like:

The final option here is to disable comments on all pages. Note that it is talking about pages, not posts. Comments are common on posts, and less common on pages, which is why I have chosen to disable them. If you just love comments, even on pages, you can leave them turned on here.

I hope this helps those of you who are new to Thesis, or are evaluating it for possible purchase. Check back here for the next in this series of “revealing” posts. Better yet, subscribe to updates by RSS or email, so you won’t miss anything. And let me know if you found this helpful by leaving me a comment.