Thesis Theme for WordPress

I updated my WordPress theme to the Thesis Theme.

The Setup – Yikes!!

When I first uploaded the theme and went into the Design page of WordPress and clicked on the theme, WordPress gave me a preview of how my site would look with the new theme.  Well, needless to say my site’s content was all squished up in the middle of the screen.  Holy Cow!!

Well, I didn’t get a screen shot of it but you do have to read the theme’s user guide first.  It clearly tells you that you need to visit the thesis and design options pages that show up in WordPress after you’ve activated the theme.  After I went to the two options pages and clicked on the Big Ass Save Button. everything looked half-way normal.

To give you and idea what happened to my front or home page, here is a screen shot of the only thing that didn’t look too cool. Also, my pages disappeared from my navigation menu. What!? Not to panic, more on that soon.

Oh Where Oh Were Did My Pages Go?

Okay, now on to the missing pages. The user’s guide clearly states where you can do this. In the Thesis Options page there is an area for your navigation menu that lists all your pages. All you have to do is click on the pages you want in your navigation menu and zoomo presto, your pages are now on the navigation menu. Woo Hoo!! Feelin’ good now!! Onward.

What’s Left?

Here’s are a few things the rest of this blog post will discuss:

1. Tracking Blog Traffic

Copying my statistics code over – Google Analytics, etc. – This is done.  I reduced my statistics tracking down to two tracking sites – Google Analytics and StatCounter.  I also have HitTail code in there to track the long tail keywords that get used by people that end up finding my site through other keywords.

I dropped my SiteMeter code because too much of the tracking code can slows things down a bit and I haven’t logged into the site for a couple/few months now.  I could drop StatCounter but I’ll keep it for today anyway.

3. RSS Feed

Change and display RSS feed information.  This one is pretty cool because you can change it on the Thesis Options page.  Just type in your FeedBurner RSS feed and away you go.  However, I want to put it up the page (above the fold) more and in one place only.

4. Background Color

Change the background color of the blog.  Again, they’ve provided a custom.css file to change the background of the Thesis theme by adding a couple/few lines of code.  Nice.

5. Navigation Menu

Colorizing (technical term) the navigation menu.  Also heightening it.  Heightening – almost doesn’t sound like a valid word.

6. Customize The Sidebar

Displaying the sidebar to my liking – Get rid of default images that are displayed in the upper right-hand corner of the page.  Actually you can put custom code in that area as well.  You can put different ads for each page/post if you’d like.

7. Testing and Reviewing

I need to test and review random older blog posts to see how they render.  Some of the images might be too wide. By default, the Thesis theme has one content area, and two sidebars.  Again, by default the content area is set to 480px and 201px sidebars.  Now, I know in the past I’ve put up images that had a width of 550px so I know it’s going to overflow the content area.

But, what’s cool about the Thesis theme is that you can select whether it’s a 3-column, 2-column or 1-column theme and, you have 5 different width settings for each area.  So all I had to do is pick the largest content width and my images on older blog posts won’t over flow.  However, that makes my sidebars rather skinny, but that’s okay for now.

8. Custom Code

I need to check all the custom code I put in my previous theme and determining what to do with it.  Whether it’s necessary now or not.

9. Header Color/Image

I’m in need of a header image for the title of my blog.

10. Category Lists

When a user clicks on a category in the sidebar, consolidate the resulting page to just hyper-linked article titles as seen below.

I had to alter the Thesis them Archives.php file to do this.  However, I might have to look at another way.  Using the Thesis theme includes future updates and I will need to take care when updating the theme because anything I’ve added (customized) to a core theme file might get over written when an update happens.

11. Redesign the Continue Reading…

…and default { x comments } below the home page posts.  These could be combined to buy up some screen real estate.

12. Design Quick Posts

With WordPress providing a quick post panel called QuickPress, I’d like to make it so the posts that are less than x characters look a bit different than the posts that are larger than x characters and have the Conintue Reading…  Adii has implemented something like this.  Very cool.  Even though it’s a normal blog post it’s almost like a Twitter tweet on your blog home page.

That’s it for now.