Thesis Theme for WordPress

January 15, 2009 in WordPress

In yesterday’s Working with WordPress post I mentioned free and paid for WordPress themes.  Themes are templates that give your blog its look and feel.  There are many themes to choose from.

If you’re just starting a blog, it’s best to just pick a theme that is pleasing to you so you don’t get caught up in wasting a bunch of time looking for the perfect theme.  If content is really king and it usually it is, then just pick a theme and get to it.

Thesis Theme

The theme I’m using is called the Thesis theme that was developed by Chris Pearson and introduced by Brian Clark of CopyBlogger.  It allows you to set various attributes of your blog by way of option pages where you pick settings from drop-down lists or check boxes.

Now that’s important, because for a long time people had to edit the various theme files to customize their theme.  I shouldn’t say “had to”, people are still doing that.

Expecting people to get into editing PHP code (WordPress themes are written in the PHP language) is so foreign that it usually results in, “This gives me a headache” response when they see the code.

For me, since I’m into looking at the code and figuring out how things work, it’s a great way to learn how a great WordPress theme developer put a together a great theme.


The Thesis Theme from Chris Pearson and DIYthemes Thesis Theme for WordPress

The Thesis Community

Although the community of Thesis theme users is growing and most of the time you can tell straight away if a blog is using the thesis theme, it is a highly customizable theme in the right hands.

It has a great support forum of users who ask or have already asked questions you might be thinking about when working with the theme.  And most likely they’ve already been answered with examples on how to customize or use the different settings.

Besides the forum, other folks have written tutorials on how they’re customizing the theme for their sites.  Rae Hoffman of Sugarrae has a great article on displaying ads per category.  So when you write articles that are in one WordPress category you can display an ad that is relevant to those articles.  This allows you to have multiple ads that are more focused on the topic at hand.  Pretty cool.

More to come on WordPress themes so make sure you subscribe.

More about: brian clark, chris pearson, copyblogger, rae hoffman, sugarrae

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  • I am looking for a good theme, free would be best, that allows me to easily edit the footer without knowing PHP. Can you recommend a set of free themes or give me advise on how to edit the footer.php? My footer.php is not legible in Wordpad.

    http://documentimagingnews.documentimagingpros.com

    Any advice would be appreciated.

    Thank you,
    Jerry
  • Don't open it in WordPad. footer.php is a text file that you open in an editor like NotePad. That will do the trick. Most themes you have to edit footer.php file to add/change anything.
  • Bill,

    Thanks for the heads up on that. I did add some HTML code to my footer and figured it out.

    Thanks for the fast response. I am new to BLOGGING and have been reading a little about SEO BLOGGING and that's my reason for doing it. Ou niche (document imaging) is highly competitive on Google and organic search is near impossible to dominate.

    So - just looking for more ways to drive traffic while adding value.

    Again - thank you,

    Jerry
  • No problem. By the way, I built a document imaging system around 2000. Used in a health care facility by approx. 250 users. VB, SQL, Kodak imaging controls. Good luck and glad I could help.
  • Wow, I bet that took some time. I know Kodak Capture is quite the product. We come up against them more and more frequently. Our vFiler Document Capture and Indexing application is written in Dephi. We created it in 2003 and have been building on it for quite some time. And our DMS is in MySQL (PHP) that loads as a LAMP stack on Windows Servers. One of our big pushes is into the healthcare market. We see their main apps now taking on document management because of HIPAA, but they all are missing an auto-filing system - hence, vFiler.

    Hey - I saw you are looking for contributors to your site. I'd be honored to contribute in any way I can.

    Jerry
  • We had inherited a product that a company abandoned and eventually there was no company. Luckily I knew one person left from that company and he unlocked the software until 2010 for me. It was a product that had to be renewed annually. So we had an infrastructure in place and built off of that. Moved images off a jukebox to servers (hard disk). Just stuck to simplicity - scan, index, search and view, categorize documents by type - H&P, EKG, etc. and various print orders.

    Anyway, if you'd like to write on a topic like promoting your product with some technical specs or something like that give it a go or give me a title. If you look through my archives, I'm kind of starting out with a schedule like:

    Monday - Money Making Monday - How to make money online
    Tuesday - Technology or technical tips, tricks, etc.
    Wednesday - WordPress
    Thursday - ?
    Friday - ?
    Saturday and Sunday - Social Media Saturday and Sunday - Includes social bookmarking, social networking, etc.

    Something like that. It's a new blog that's trying to find its way. :)

    Keep articles around 300-500 words or so. Obviously stuff that helps people out is always great.
  • Bill,

    I'd really enjoy that! And I have a lot of ideas to help people promote their business or products including video creation for the web, using some services that help get their videos to appear on their first page of search engines, etc...etc..

    When would you like my first article submitted for your review and how would you like me to get them to you?
  • Either attach the article and email it to me at billbolmeier@gmail.com or a title and 2-3 sentences in my contact form.
  • Excellent - I will start on next weeks.
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