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.
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- Thesis runs our intranet
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- As well as simple, niche sites
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- And our design intensive sites
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:
- 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.
- 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!
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Jared: No doubt I’m not the only one who feels this way about Thesis!
Good review, and some great examples of customisations.
The Luxury Portfolio is absolutely gorgeous. Thanks for sharing!
And I think Thesis is great, although I haven’t pushed it anywhere near as far as you have. (That may change
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Cheers for the feedback everyone. Honestly, it’s blown me away just how far you can take things with Thesis.
I’ve added a link to one of the personal agent websites we run, just to show another slightly different approach.
It’s all running on WPMU too, so we’ve been able to do some cool things with custom_functions to pull custom files according to blog ID. More on that later though!
Thesis sounds a lot like the Carrington theme/framework (http://crowdfavorite.com/wordpress/carrington/readme/) – granularity, abstraction, sandbox support etc. From your perspective, what advantages does Thesis have over Carrington?
We’ve designed http://www.fuseboxtheatre.com with Thesis and it’s been an absolute joy.
When I’m developing a site for a client, Wordpress + Thesis is my starting point. No matter how specific their requests have been, I haven’t run into anything that this combination cannot accommodate.
Hi All
I want to develop a Thesis theme for distribution. No here’s where the Q comes in… Can I upload my Thesis Theme onto a MySpace page?
Anthony: There’s no doubt Carrington packs some great features and, especially for a free app, is a stand-out Wordpress framework. Nevertheless, Thesis stands out for me for a few reasons: First up, and this is arguably less important for developers, Thesis comes loaded with way more detailed options right from a slick options panel. Secondly, and I can’t speak to full details on how this compares to Carrington, but for the reasons I’ve discussed above Thesis has been a dream to develop and implement. Finally, Thesis comes with a killer community on top of a dedicated support team. As I mentioned in my post, access to the Thesis forums seems worth the license cost alone!
AJ: I’m not 100% sure what you’re looking at doing, but Wordpress and MySpace are definitely two different beasts that I don’t think’ll mix.
Your use of Thesis is amazing. I have no idea how to use hooks. Would love to see some of your code for your property sites. Any chance of a link or some snippets to help us with no idea how the hooks work? Well done.
My problem with Thesis is that 95%+ of the sites built with it look just like the out-of-the-box theme. I’ve really only been impressed with one or two Thesis variations. And personally, I hate the options page in Wordpress. I’d rather dig into the code. But I can see where it would be beneficial for non-techie clients.
Seems this theme framework idea is going the way of premium magazine themes. There are so many free “premium” themes out there now it is foolish to pay for a magazine theme. Thesis was ingenious when it first came out, but now there are free options out there which are just as good – Carrington (mentioned above), Thematic from themeshaper.com, and Theme Hybrid from themehybrid.com just to name a few. Can’t see why anyone would pay for Thesis today. Maybe 6 months ago…
I completely agree Dan, i’m getting so tired of seeing Thesis. I own it, and stopped using it at v1.2 when the single.php was dropped and the head section filled up with bloat (20 odd rel stylesheets).
Also not sure how Chris can BS and say “Thesis boasts the strongest SEO of any theme” because it’s simply not true, Thesis is not even in the top 10.
Matt — How can I claim such “BS?” Well, I did write Thesis. What the hell have you done, Mr. I Don’t Leave a URL Because I’m a Chump?
Oh, I forgot to mention that I’ve got the full backing of industry leaders like Michael Gray, Brian Clark, Aaron Wall, Rae Hoffman, Andy Hagans, Patrick Gavin, Darren Rowse, Chris Brogan and hordes of others (none of whom would touch Thesis if they weren’t 100% confident in it).
So really, don’t take my word for it.
Thesis sites look the same when the owner doesn’t do much customization, which is like saying all WordPress sites look the same until the owner bothers to switch from Kubrick. The two things you can instantly do to make your Thesis theme not look like the default theme is to change the fonts and write some custom CSS for the navbar.
Thats not a weakness, rather a strength. Thesis comes so well coded and configurable straight out of the box with no code touches needed that you can launch a new site quickly and put all your effort into coding. The great layouts and SEO help get your site going quickly as you then tweak and customize over time.
I’ve had much better SEO results with Thesis than with launching with custom developed or any free theme out there. In fact, I dropped Thesis into a 2 year old blog of mine, spent a couple hours tweaking the design a little, and within a month had gone from an average 6000 visitors to over 8000 visitors.
There are great themes and frameworks out there, some free some paid, but Thesis is the first one I’ve found I can develop most effectively for.
Dan: I’ll agree that there’s some other themes out there heading down the framework path and I reckon that can only be a good things for Wordpress in general.
Specifically though, as I’ve discussed above, there’s some killer features in Thesis that I haven’t seen anywhere else. For developers that’s a combination of the power under the hood and the framework setup. That’s on top of a great options panel if you’re that way inclined.
With respect to the generic nature of the Thesis theme, I’ll put my hand up and say that I personally don’t and won’t make much use of the default styling. But that’s not what Thesis is about, it’s a canvas. In terms of structure, the default setup is a great starting point, but the extent to which bloggers and developers leave it at that it entirely at their discretion.
On top of all that, one of the most invaluable resources I’ve found with Thesis has been the community – I’ll admit I haven’t participated in all of the communities of the themes mentioned above, but from what I’ve gathered there’s really nothing on the scale of what’s going over at DIYthemes.
Matt: Sorry, but I’m with Chris on this one. No point fighting assertions with assertions, but there’s a body of evidence out there – much of it in real world examples – illustrating the power of Thesis SEO. Not to mention some of the great resources out there to stretch every last drop out of Thesis on that front.
Mitch dropped a roundabout link to us in his last comment, and, being sensitive of ear, we wondered what all the fuss was about. There is no doubt Thesis looks – our site is a shining example – like complete rubbish on install.
Thank goodness. If Thesis were any better-looking, it might be left live “as it comes” and would soon be as bland, obvious, and overused as any other $60 “pretty bits” theme/template out there. If you’re looking for a whore in a corset, the template mills have you covered; but nobody we’ve spoken to is buying Thesis for the visible skin. The fact anything displays whatsoever is almost a happy byproduct of the skeletal framework.
If Pearson made Thesis look halfway as decent as many of his own “premium themes” from years past, the arguments for Thesis being an “overseen” design would be quite valid, and we’d have surely ignored both him and Thesis forever. It’s the fundamentals that set a product such as WordPress apart as a blogging, site, or CMS system, and it’s the secondary enablers such as Thesis that make a combination “done to the fun bits” in a few minutes.
In our opinion, the rapidity of the versions and adoption rates means that in many bases, “oh look dear, a fresh Thesis” sites today are the equivalent of those animated Under Construction GIFs from ten years ago. Some will remain that way forever and die, but for the rest, the owner will get respectable site traffic the entire time they’re dodging orange cones and unwashed crews in plastic hats.
i’m Malaysia web developer, and i really love thesis theme from DIYthemes.com…
cheers mate!
I just adopted Thesis to start my new blog &, well, may have some technical difficulties to clean up in regards to my first-round customizations, but that’s kind of my own issue.
Nevertheless, I can say that when I decided I wanted to start a blog, I immediately hunted through endless free themes. I found elements that I liked & some that I didn’t, but when I chose a theme that was the best compromise or “closest” to what I wanted, I would then discover that this or that functionality was broken or make some other disappointing revelation about what happened on deeper pages, etc. When I would attempt to get support for an issue, there was none.
I checked out Thesis, and was not impressed with the out of the box look–boring. But, the more I tried to get something to work for me, the more I realized that Thesis is clean and mean, it has well-tested code, and a whole community of support behind it. That’s what I need. I realized that ultimately with the ability to customize the look really as far as you are willing and able to take it, what you are buying is a clean framework with support. I was frustrated that some small customizations took more effort for a newbie than expected. Still, overall, I am very, very pleased with the framework, which is a much better starting place than almost any I’ve seen.
Cheers!
Good to see all the support for Thesis. I am looking for something like this. To me Carrington theming sounds similar to Drupal’s theming, which is great. But I need something lighter for small custom Wordpress sites.
Besides the theming difference between Thesis and Carrington, are there other important differences on the backend with respect to plugins, etc?
Hello Mitch,
I purchased Thesis earlier this year after reading all of the hype. It is a great theme but, as others have said, unless you are proficient in CSS and can alter your custom.php file as well – you can’t do all of the great things that you would like to. I understand the latest version allows more color customization etc without doing additional coding though but I also understand the there have been problems updating to the new version so I have left it alone.
I did not know I needed to know coding when I purchased the Theme and so I bought some books to help me and frequented the Thesis Forum. But the forum has been unable or unwilling to help me with some of my issues so I don’t feel welcomed there.
I was wondering if you know some other site where we Thesis, users that are NOT css coding experts, can get some assistance? Since we paid a price we should get some reliable support IMHO.
I have needed help with my header problem for months now but have no where to turn.
Thanks for reading
PS LOVE your fat footer and wish I could create one! I have been joneseing for one for months
SonDan