After watching Marko Saric’s video tutorial of Thesis 1.6, I decided to give it a try on my website and my blog. The installation process on my website went pretty much without a hitch. I say pretty much, because the upgrade didn’t include the code that I had used to design my interface. The reason for that was because some of the base code for the css has changed.
Instead of using the “tabs” code for the navigation bar, we now have to use “menu”. Fortunately, I was able to put everything back to where it was, thanks to Greg Rickaby, who wrote Oh Crap: Your Thesis Customization isn’t Future Proof. Once I pasted the copy into my css file, everything looked fine except one thing . . . the navigation bar.
One of the best things about this upgrade is that it automatically creates dropdown menus, based on your nested pages and categories. This was a feature I’ve been wanting since I first started blogging. But for some reason, I couldn’t get the hover color to work. I spent all evening on the problem until I finally took it to the DIY forums. These people are such a godsend for coding newbies like me. As it turned out, I had duplicated part of the code so that there was a conflict. Once I fixed that, the navbar worked fine.
There’s still some issues, however. For one, I wasn’t able to upgrade directly from 1.5 on this blog. My color changes to the navbar don’t always work from the Design Options menu, forcing me to edit the css file, which I can now do directly from the Admin Panel.
Was the Upgrade Worth It?
No, because the upgrade is a beta version, which means that there are bugs to work out, as I mentioned above. As far as the new navbar dropdown feature is concerned, that was very nice. I like that I can colorize my site and page backgrounds, my post and sidebar text, links, and the multimedia and navigation boxes via the Design Options interface.
I would also hold out on upgrading because Thesis 2.0 is due to come out at any time. Chris Pearson stated on the DIY forum that he has rewritten 95% of the code for this upgrade. Rumor has it that it’s due to launch this month, but this month is beginning to come to a close. So, I will say that 2.0 will come soon.
Features I Would Like to See in Thesis 2.0
- Better customization of headers and footers: Not everybody who uses Thesis knows how to code. Or, they know just enough code to get them in trouble. If you are one of those people, then customizing your header to include your logo is a royal pain. I would love the ability to upload my logo into my header the same way that I’m able to upload images to my posts. The same goes for the footer.
- Better customization of sidebars: Although I can now colorize the text in my sidebar without having to go into the css file, I am not yet able to colorize (or upload an image) the sidebar without pasting some code into the file.
If you use Thesis, what features would you like to have?
