Thesis Theme For WordPress: pros and cons

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I’m using Chris Pearson’s Thesis Theme here on Website In A Weekend and on There Is No Box.

Using Thesis Theme for your WordPress website benefits you in many ways:

1. Thesis OpenHook plugin rocks! You can change CSS styling, add functions and code, and never touch the core Thesis Theme files. This means that when you upgrade Thesis, all you need to do is move your “custom” directory, and everything just works in the new theme. All themes should be this way!
2. You can tweak your css on a fairly fine-grained level to obtain better typography.
3. Lot’s of administrative options. Another theme I really like, Atahualpa, has a number of the same options, but the administration interface isn’t as elegant as Thesis.
4. The default appearance is really, really nice! If you love the written word, and appreciate typesetting and layout, Thesis is a very attractive theme, right “out of the box.”
5. You get access to a dedicated forum of All Things Thesis. If you’re tired of beating your head to get help, having access to a dedicated forum may pay you back the first time you get stuck!

I have been using Thesis about 3 months now, and I’m very happy with it’s performance and stability. I anticipate using it for at least another 6 months on both of the current sites, possibly longer, and will be installing it on another site in the near future (which may be announced in the newsletter).

Some shortcomings of Thesis

All is not roses! Or, with the roses come the thorns… and Thesis does have a few little thorns of it’s own.

If Thesis has any fault, it would have to be that the CSS styling is a bit “overtweaked.” The default CSS is beautiful… but it’s very tightly coupled to the default look and feel. When you change the look and feel, you may spend a lot more time than you think should be necessary rooting around in the CSS to “fix” a display. This is normally not an issue with most themes, nor with Thesis for that matter, but occasionally plugins such as WP-Syntax require overriding the CSS. Fortunately, this is made simpler using the Thesis OpenHook plugin.

Here’s a couple of examples:

1. Adding AWeber autoresponder signup box with a table. Thesis table handling is quite pretty, as long as you want tables to look like the thesis author wants them to look. On other themes, table behavior is “normal” and you don’t need to be mucking around “fixing it.” Yes, I know I can add or change the CSS in OpenHook, my point is that with other themes, it’s not necessary for me to search for the relevant CSS properties for “fixing tables.”
2. Contact Form 7 table layout suffers from the same problem: difficult to understand which table attributes to override.

You’re going to have to do some work to make look like something other than Thesis, but that’s true of any theme. No theme will absolve you from the responsibility of learning (and doing) some basic design if you want to be unique. Thesis just gives you a lot more leverage.

In short, Thesis is NOT Magic Pixie Dust which will make all your design issues disappear with a clap of thunder. But it will allow you to do more design faster than any other theme I’ve installed!

Developing with Thesis

I have a developers license for Thesis, and would be delighted to help anyone work out any issues they may have with Thesis.

If you’re in this “WordPress Business” for the long haul, I recommend getting your hands on a copy of Thesis sooner than later. I’m an affiliate of course, and if you like the theme, you should sign up as an affiliate as well.

Tagged as: Themes, Thesis