DIY Thesis Theme for WordPress (Review)

matthewdiehl — Tue, 29 Jun 2010 20:25:47 +0000

Honestly, the Thesis Theme for WordPress has been the easiest “theme” thus far that I have used on my blog.

I use theme in quotes above because Thesis goes above and beyond any other theme I have seen for WordPress. The functionality that has been built into the back-end to customize not only the look & feel but the functionality is astounding.

A little background
I had been reading and polling the peanut gallery on Twitter about the Thesis Theme for nearly two months before I actually pulled the trigger and bought a copy for my blog. Previously to buying the Thesis Theme, I had never spent money on the design of my blog. I was the kinda guy who would just grab a readily available free theme and off I went customizing, coding, adding plug-ins and grinding to get it to where I was happy.

All the time and effort I put into these free themes did not seem a waste of time until now because the Thesis Theme comes ripped, roaring and ready to go.

About Thesis Theme Features
Thesis comes pre-built with a ton (thats the scientific term) of options for the design of your site. That’s why very few people who have the Thesis Theme have identical looking sites. Thesis makes it simple to change color schemes, column layouts, featured headlines and much more. Just take a look at the design options:

The brilliant part is that they have not nailed you down with a finite set of options you still have full customization control of the design using hooks and filters. With over 50 hooks and 20 filters you can arrange, rearrange and create a custom Thesis Theme for your site by adding your own touches of code from head to footer on the site.

Beyond design and customization Thesis is built for SEO. This was one of the primary goals of Thesis, cut the fat and generate clean code that the search engines will easily digest and pass the value on to your site. Also, built in are some features that follow SEO best practices and have allowed me to reduce the number of plug-ins that I need running on my site. Here is a look at some of the options Thesis offers you:

There is something else that Thesis totes over any other theme for WordPress and that is a full support community. With over 100,000 posts in the support forum and over 20,000 users you are sure to either find or get your questions about Thesis answered. I have been in the forum and these guys know there stuff, worth the $87 for the support forum alone!

In Closing
I am now a complete and total Thesis Theme fanboy. If you are considering changing your theme for your WordPress installation seriously consider the Thesis Theme for WordPress it far exceeded my expectations and I am positive it will meet and exceed yours.

*Note: Links in post are affiliate links, here is a non-affiliate link Thesis Theme

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Andy Beal’s 21 WordPress Plugins & Commenter Superpacks

Andy Beal’s 21 WordPress Plugins & Commenter Superpacks

matthewdiehl — Fri, 19 Dec 2008 15:12:04 +0000

For those of you haven’t seen it yet Andy Beal, author of Radically Transparent, shared his secret list of the best 21 WordPress plugins for new blogs at Marketing Pilgrim. The last time I checked there were over 150 comments on the post. People offered up their amazement at finding must have new plugins and others shared the plugin that makes their blog a cut above the rest.

Now for the goods…

I have taken the time to download all of Andy’s top plugins that make Marketing Pilgrim the awesome site that is and created the Andy Beal 21 WordPress Plugins Superpack. It contains the latest version of all the plugins mentioned on Marketing Pilgrim (as of 12/18/2008).

Download Andy Beal’s Superpack (880 Kbytes)

Also, I have combed the comments on the post and extracted all the recommened WordPress plugins that readers of Marketing Pilgrim offered up. They offered an additional 36 great plugins on top of Andy’s list (get commenter superpack). Here is the list (as of 12/19/2008):

All in One SEO Pack – Allows for custom title, description and keyword tags for all posts and pages (link)
Amazon Reloaded – Easily add Amazon affiliate links to your blog (replaces WP-Amazon as it is no longer being updated) (link)
Contact Commenters – Adds interactivity with commenters via email (link)
Draft Notification – Emails admin when draft post is saved(link)
EasyTube – Easy YouTube and Google video linking via tags (link)
Exclude Pages – Allows to specify which pages will and will not be included in menus that list pages (link)
Feedburner Feedsmith – Captures all feed links and redirects to Feedburner for easy tracking of subscribers (link)
Feed WordPress – Atom/RSS aggregator for WordPress (link)
Google Analyticator – Installs Google Analytics on all WorPress pages without changing theme coding (link)
Google Maps Advanced – Allows for the easy integration of Google Maps into WordPress (link)
Google XML Sitemaps – Automatically creates a Google XML compliant file when site is updated and notifies search engines (link)
Headspace 2 – Meta data manager for custom titles, descriptions, keywords, site name, “more text” and more (link)
Internal Link Builder – Allows for mass upload and management of keywords tied to the pages they correspond to (link)
Order Categories – Drag and drop category reordering(link)
OZH Who Sees Ads – Customized ad displaying based on user defined values (example – ads for new visitors and no ads for returning visitors) (link)
PageMash – Reorder, restructure and decide which pages show in your menus (link)
Referrer Detector – Custom greetings based on where your visitors orginate from (link)
Robots Meta – Easily manage Robots Meta tag on multiple pages (link)
SEM DoFollow – Removes “Nofollow” attribute on comments (link)
Simple Tags – Tag management plugin (link)
SMS Text Message – Admin can send alerts and updates to blog readers who enter in a cellphone number (link)
Sociable – Adds up to 99 social bookmarking site links (link)
Stats – Provides clear and concise data on a select few important blog stats ie. pageviews, visitors, etc. (link)
Sticky Posts – Adds a sticky post feature to your blog (now standard in WordPress 2.7) (link)
TagPig – Fully automates tagging and categorization (link)
TwitMe – Automatically posts new blog posts to your Twitter webpage (link)
Twitter Tools – Complete integration of your Twitter account into your WordPress blog (link)
Tylr Slidr – Adds quicktag button to WYSIWYG editor for including Flickr tools like FlickrSlidr(link)
WordPress Mobile Edition – Mobile device freindly interface for mobile browsers of your site(link)
WP125 Ad Manager – Manages 125 x 125 ads on site including click reports, ad expiration and more (link)
WP-Cumulus Tag Cloud – 3D interactive tag cloud feature (link)
WP Hashcash – Requires actual pageview to prevent robot spam comments and pingbacks (link)
WP-Polls – Poll plugin with built in quicktagging and customization (link)
WP-Postalicious – Posts your delicious, magnolia and Google reader bookmarks to your blog (link)
WP-PostViews – Allows you to display the number of times a post has been viewed (easy counter) (link)
WP-SpamFree – Eliminates comment, trackback and pingback spam from bots (link)

Download Commenter Plugin Superpack (5.2 Mbytes)

Related posts:

DIY Thesis Theme for WordPress (Review)

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Search Engine Marketing Blog » WordPress

DIY Thesis Theme for WordPress (Review)

Andy Beal’s 21 WordPress Plugins & Commenter Superpacks