Thesis Skins and Customizations

Social proof is a powerful thing. Showing how many people are talking about your article on Twitter can encourage more people to talk about it, that’s a fact. Humans are silly and trusting this way.

The way most people go about it is by installing some sort of a widget or plugin. Now you say, “But Matt, why wouldn’t I want to use a plugin!? Plugins are awesome!”

Well there are a few reasons for this:

• To allow greater customization and to separate yourself from other sites.
• To keep your Wordpress install lean. Do we really need 1000 plugins mucking up our Wordpress install to do even the simplest tasks?
• To feel awesome. Haha, this is sort of a joke but I’m a huge nerd and get satisfaction out of doing things myself, and you might too. Plus every learning experience is a good one.

Plus it’s extremely easy. How easy? Here’s the code:

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Almost every blog you come across will have an archives page. Unfortunately, most of them will only show you a list of posts by month. An archives page is a prime place to get a reader further into your site.

Here you’ll learn how to add an archives page to Wordpress that not only shows a monthly archive, but also your categories, every post you’ve written, your most popular posts, and even a search box, using jQuery to keep everything organized and easy to navigate.

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One of the most popular features to have in websites today is the “featured content slider” (or “featured post slider”). It gives people a glimpse into your better posts and can catch their attention right away. For these reasons, it was one of the first features I included in my latest premium Thesis skin.

Today I’m going to tell you how you can do it for your own Thesis site (if for some crazy reason you don’t use Thesis Magazine :p)

So without further ado, here’s how to add a jQuery-powered featured content slider to Thesis in 5 quick steps:

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There’s been a problem going around lately regarding some people using Host Gator along with the Thesis Wordpress theme. I’ve seen three posts in the forum pop up this week (one of which was made by me) so I figured I should probably put this post up.

Even if you haven’t noticed any problem, I’d recommend testing this out to see if you’re affected. It’s something that doesn’t show on the front end, only the back, and it’d be best to get it fixed now rather than when you’re trying to make an important change to your site.

Anyway, here’s what to do if your Thesis options won’t save.

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Note: This is another post stolen from my web design blog.

This article could also be called “How I Designed the Words Skin” because this is a list of almost all the modifications I made to the default Thesis install. Please don’t just take all of my customizations, but rather learn from them. After reading through all of these you should get a basic understanding of Thesis hooks, custom functions, and your custom.css file and also the knowledge to make some basic (and more advanced) hacks.

So without further ado, here are 10 ways to quickly make your Thesis site stand out from the rest:

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