DIYNINJAS only exists because of how genuinely excited we are about DIYtheme’s Thesis Theme. From the ground up we’ve found Thesis has been an incredible foundation for both the architecture of every site we’ve developed and also as a springboard for what we believe are simple to use, yet visually stunning sites. Thesis has stood out for it’s flexibility, it’s smarts and for providing an unprecedented return on our investment all while being a whole lot of fun. Thesis isn’t just a theme, or even a framework, it’s a philosophy. And that’s why we can’t get enough.

Flexibility

Thesis is profoundly malleable. It drives our intranet (sorry, you don’t need a link to that!), quick fire niche sites such as our Devonport Rentals page or personal agent websites and heavily customized, high impact sites such as our Luxury Portfolio website for high end homes. Just take a look at the DIYthemes showcase and you’ll see how far people can take Thesis. Oh and I shouldn’t need to mention that DIYNINJAS is all running on smoking hot Thesis too, of course.

Smartest. Theme. Ever.

The internet is full of reviews and testimonials describe just how clever Thesis is so we’ll keep this brief. Thesis has provided fantastic search engine results for us thus far. Our sites are indexed and indexed quickly and it makes implementing all of those extra SEO For Everybody strategies a breeze. What’s more important to us however is the fundamental principle behind Thesis: all user customization is restricted to a slick and ever expanding options panel and two sandboxed files, one for CSS and one for PHP functions. This makes future upgrades a breeze and once you’ve got your Thesis Hooks down, extremely granular customization is a piece of cake. Every change at our Luxury Portfolio website, which looks and feels wildly different to your standard Thesis install are restricted to those two files. And just to be clear, we haven’t just changed a few colours and added in an extra sidebar widget – we’ve changed everything.

In case you don’t believe me, here’s a few of my favourite hacks we’ve pulled, all using purely our custom files:

• High impact landing page and user friendly pages. We run a grunty slideshow and big menu options on our homepage, but switch to a more search-functional format for the rest of the site. This is achieved primarily through Thesis cleverly placing unique classes for each page, making specific changes in your custom.css a piece of cake.
• Sold property overlays at the click of a button. Using custom_functions to inject a <span> tag, conditional on custom fields, we’re able to overlay a transparent PNG on top of sold properties. Looks great and it’s just too easy for our end users.
• Awesome preview images for all our listings when searching. Again, using only custom files (and custom fields) to display these. You’ll notice we’ve been able to easily drop our overlays in for our preview images too.

Have a look around the site and you’ll see there’s plenty more. And every single change sits happily in our custom folder. Like I said, just too easy with Thesis.

Return on Investment

Thesis is damn good value. But even if it wasn’t, we’d still be making a killer return on our investment. Why’s that? Obviously the features I’ve described above are pretty crucial in this, but there’s something else that has made Thesis far more valuable to us and it’s rooted in why we think Thesis is the smartest theme ever. You see, keeping everything in just a few sandboxed files means a number of things:

1. Trouble shooting, tweaking and upgrading becomes significantly easier. We put a fair bit of effort into keeping our custom files organised and well commented, but even if you were the sloppiest coder out there, all of your modifications are no more than a CMD + F away. And if you like to keep your custom files organized, then things just keep getting better. We generally arrange ours from top to bottom, with individual page changes stashed wherever they make sense. For anyone in web development this is incredible. If you’re trouble shooting for a client, it’s almost always restricted to two files. If you’ve got more than one person on your team, it’s super easy for them to figure out what’s going on if you’re not around. Likewise, when it comes to making tweaks or updating old sites, everything – especially when compared to digging through dozens of template files – is just so easy to find. Frankly, we think it’s pretty revolutionary.
2. Not only does the Thesis philosophy make us more efficient however, it also means everything we learn and code for one theme can be transplanted – literally and figuratively – to any other project. Sure, that applies with anything – from the language you’re writing in or engine you’re building on top of, but with all of our changes confined to just two files the effect is amplified – hugely – with Thesis.

Did I mention it’s fun?

The awesomeness of Thesis has meant an incredible community has built up around it. Not only does DIYthemes provide a great support effort, but there’s an ever increasing community of talented and inspired developers who are excited to help people take their Thesis project to the next level. Honestly, asides from being fun, the DIYthemes forum is worth the cost of a Thesis license in itself in terms of time it will save you and inspiration it will render.

All in all, working with Thesis has been a joy. We’ve had awesome results so far and because of the underlying principles of developing with Thesis, our ability to leverage it’s power increases exponentially with every moment we invest with it.

Seriously, give Thesis a try – you won’t look back. Oh, and if you’re already a Thesis user, think about upgrading to a developer’s license, it’s seriously good value especially given just how far and wide you can stretch this theme!