As mentioned in my earlier post, I bought my Thesis wordpress theme under “Developer” package in 2011. That was because I had been so fed-up using all the free themes out there which given a lot of restriction such as little/ no customization allowed, dropping of site performance in Google search due to the hidden links in the template and theme breaking at the installation of certain plugin or WordPress upgrade.
During that time, I did not have much time to explore the template as my full time job was getting more and more demanding. During the earlier versions of Thesis like 1.8, you still need to know a bit of writing CSS scripts in order to do simple things like change the menu colour, create very customised pages, create sidebar for different pages, etc.
Sometimes when time permits, I would then sit down and dabble around with the theme to figure out ways to customize my site further.
However, Thesis theme helped me to improve a third party site that I was running to look more professional and clean.
Fast forward to 2017, I have left my corporate job, settled into daily routine and find a bit of extra time in my hands. I fiddled around again with my Thesis version 1.8 and the Thesis Openhook. When I upgraded the Thesis openhook plugin, it became “WordPress Hook” and I was so upset that it losses the functionalities that I had so desperately needed.
I googled and searched….there was so little articles and guides available. I had expected the search results to be filled with tutorials and posts imaginable on Thesis just like how it was when I bought the theme in 2011.
But it was not to be. Many people have jumped ship to other themes. A lot of negative reviews and the comment was lack of tutorials and how-to guides to help struggling Thesis wordpress users.
The sad thing is, when I google about Thesis wordpress theme, I keep arriving at non related pages of essay writing pages, or search results that talks about thesis, as in the dissertation that you submit during college or university.
There is literally lack of proper free guide on Thesis version 2 and above.
When I saw the option to upgrade from 1.84 to 2.1 in my Theme section of my WordPress dashboard, I upgraded and spend sometime to figure out how to get the theme to work. Eventually I login to my account in diythemes and downloaded the Thesis version 2.3 and uploaded in my WordPress dashboard.
Through continuous trial and error, I am able to product the simple look that I wanted using the upgraded Thesis theme.
I feel sad that many people had jumped ship to other Themes citing the theme is not user friendly and hard to figure out. Yes, admittedly Thesis canvas style pages ride on a whole new concept….but I assure you, once you get the whole setup figured out, you would appreciate what a great help the Thesis wordpress theme is to non techies.
You need not need to CSS code any more pages to change the layout and structure of your page (unless you are planning to build a full fledged designer site- then regardless of the template that you buy, you would still need to customise them). But the marvelous drag and drop function enables you to create custom boxes, sidebars and pages.
That is why I have decided to dedicate a section of this blog just to talk about Thesis wordpress theme and write some tutorials- this theme has came a long way since version 1.xx.
I would be coming up with more articles related to the Thesis wordpress 2.3. At the time of writing, Thesis 2.4 is already out- I downloaded and explored at one of my sites and noted that a lot of functionalities in Thesis 2.3 still applies in 2.4.
If you are still keeping your Thesis developer license, why not download the latest version and implement the Thesis theme again on your site. Fortunately I have not given up on Thesis and I hope that you would not too.
And those who are thinking whether you should purchase the Thesis theme or not, don’t take my word for it. Look around this site and other sites (healthblog.yinteing.com; visit-malaysia.yinteing.com) that I have build based on my interest topics. Please understand that I have build these sites using just the functionality in Thesis wordpress theme version 2.3 with the help of a few plugins.
I don’t use any custom CSS for now because previously my site had crashed a few times. This happened when I had earlier resisted to upgrade to the new Thesis theme and tried to tweak on my own using tutorials provided in blogs. I copied and pasted some CSS scripting based on the tutorials found in a few blogs and bang! My sites could not be accessed due to some error with the scripting. It is likely the band-aid solution provided by bloggers were not comparable with my site or WordPress version. Perhaps in future, I will look into learning CSS when I have more time.
Stay tuned for more tutorials related to Thesis WordPress theme.