Thesis Tutorial – 3 Basic Thesis Customizations

As most of you already know, I have moved over to using the Thesis theme and I have not looked back once. The ease of changing and updating your theme will just blow your mind and body away.

In this post I have tried to show how easy it is to customize your theme to make your site different and unique. I have only been using Thesis for just under a month now.

Thesis OpenHook Plugin

The old way of making changes to your custom files was by editing the files and then uploading them back to your server. I never liked doing that.

This has all changed with the new Thesis OpenHook plugin. From the image on the left, you can see ‘Thesis Custom Styling‘ which is your custom.css file and ‘Thesis Custom Programming‘ which is your custom_functions.php file.

Not only can arbitrary HTML, CSS, JavaScript, and even PHP be inserted into any of Thesis’ hooks, you can also easily remove any of the hooked default elements within Thesis with the click of a button!

Read more about Thesis OpenHook plugin on WordPress

Place the menu underneath the header

You will notice that the default Thesis theme has the navigational menu on top of the site title, this is somewhat nice but boring. You could change it so it’s underneath the title and that is what I’m going to show you

You can simply copy the PHP code into your custom_functions.php file and it will automatically do the rest. The hooks are ‘thesis_hook_before_header’ and ‘thesis_hook_after_header’.

Put a clickable image in your header

Ok, I know you have seen many sites have a clickable image header instead of the title and this is so basic to do.

My site currently has this feature and it makes it stand out, it solely depends on the size and length of your image as well. Your sites image header plays a very important role and I can not emphasis that enough. Take your time and invest in an image that depicts your content and yourself.

You could outsource it if you want to, that will be your choice. If you have a logo already, then all you have to do is upload it to your wp-content/themes/thesis_15/custom/images folder.

Then simply put the CSS styling code into your custom.css file and it will automatically do the rest. You might have to play around with the height and width to get your image in place as my image is long and wide.

Creating a Blogroll links page

I thought Thesis would have a standard template to display your blogroll links that you had entered via the admin panel, but that was not the case. So I searched the net and eventually found some code that I could manipulate and use as my own.

You can view my links page to see how it will turn out. Now, you will first have to create a page, thats if you don’t already have one to display your links on.  Find out what the post number is and then replace the numbers 532 in the code snippet below with your post number.

You can simply put the PHP function into your custom_functions.php file and it will automatically do the rest:

Download: Thesis Tutorial - 3 Basic Customizations (Menu/Header/Blogroll) (408) 827 bytes

I have edited this post and put the CSS and PHP in a text file. Download the zipped file and get it working on your site in less than 10 minutes.

Conclusion:

Thesis is simple, yet gives you the ability to make changes on the fly. I hope my customizations above have shown you how easy it is to apply the changes.

Over the next couple of weeks, I hope to post more on customizing Thesis. Feel free to let me know what you think or have tried. I’m open to suggestions and your experiences concerning Thesis.

Tagged as: blogroll links, blogroll page, clickable header, clickable image, css, custom, custom css, customize thesis, custom_functins.php, image, links page, menu, menu under header, openhook, php, plugin, Thesis, thesis openhook plugin, Wordpress

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WordPress & Thesis Customizations

This webiste is using Thesis theme & WordPress. I can create you a similar website or update yours.

View my services or portfolio for more details.

Author Information

Article by George Serradinho

I am the proud owner of Serradinho and have made this my second home. I'm into blogging, downloads, WordPress and the internet in general. I also love meeting and helping others and learning new techniques.