First steps into customizing Wordpress and the Thesis theme

I have a Thesis tutorial up, complete with code and source files. Look it up if you’re looking to customize your Wordpress Thesis theme.

Somehow I had forgotten how much I despise writing code. I am one of those persons that can read lines of code, just like I can read music sheets, but who sucks badly at writing it (and at playing any musical instruments for that matter).

The code and programs I’ve been writing while at Uni. were often long and complex while they could have been short and sweet. Even with Max/MSP (which is the language I handle the best), I tend to get lost into infinite loops till all goes to hell. Funnily enough, if I have an outsider’s perspective on someone’s code, I can usually understand their process and proceed to optimization.

What does Wordpress and Thesis have to do with it?

Well as you can see, this blog is still very much new. I spent the day yesterday researching Wordpress themes that would suit my needs, i.e. that would have a clean interface and would be customizable enough. I found a post on Six Revisions where a few pleasing templates were listed. Among those there was the Modicus Remix template, which had everything I needed. Great! I thought. And free!

After installation, I decided it was time to get my hands dirty. It’s my first time dealing with Wordpress’ backbone, and I felt quite confident that all would go smoothly. Indeed, minor changes can be applied fairly easily within the template. It was more a question of getting used to all those php files and understand the architecture of it all.

I did reach the limits of “easy” fairly soon though.

I tried to apply a permalink setting to the blog to make sure my URLs would be as descriptive (and indexable) as possible. Somehow, the template could not handle it and would bring me to an error page. I tried diggin’ into the code and see why this was happening – it was not a successful endeavor. Being past midnight sure didn’t help…

I woke up this morning from a thick, deep haze. As I was making coffee, I remembered reading about the Thesis Wordpress template and thought it might be an option to consider. I had a quick look at the DIYThemes website and decided to invest in it.

I am impressed.

It is highly customizable, and its promise to be SEO-friendly seems quite right. I love that I can add meta descriptions to my posts and have them inserted automatically into the page’s tag. It is RSS-ready and favours the use of Feedburner.

On the option page, there was a mention of Mint, a website analytics tool. I had never heard of that add-on before, so of course it got me curious and I had a look at their website. Turns out you can add the Mint feature to your site for a flat fee of 30$, which is fairly cheap next to other SEO tools. It’s still 30$ more than Google Analytics… Nonetheless, I did buy a license and installed it in a breeze. I’ll compare its results to Google Analytics and report back in a few weeks.

Right, the code.

So Thesis is highly customizable from within Wordpress. If you’ve never touched code before and are not intending to either, I’d strongly suggest you give this template a try. You can set your header tags, fonts, widgets, and column layout with a few clicks. But its true power lies within its code architecture, which is smartly organized and well commented. Honestly I’m still trying to get my head around the Hooks concept (see update below) and figuring out those CSS snippets I used to know well. If you’re using Firefox, you can get a fantastic add-on to “read” HTML and CSS from within the browser. That add-on is called Firebug. It’s a great tool to figure out what code does and where it is located within your site’s architecture/CSS sheets.

I’m extremely excited at the possibilities of this template and of Wordpress. I’ll be working on the layout quite a bit within the next few weeks, so come back often to see how it’s evolving!

Update!
I stumbled upon this blog from Kristarella when browsing the Thesis support forums. It has interesting and useful tutorials to help you style your templates. Click here for her Header tutorial. It has helped me a great deal! Also, for a great tutorial on using hooks, check out Sugarrae’s tutorial. It’s very well written and incredibly useful. I now get the hooks concept and started implementing them!