Thesis Tutorial - Hooks for Dummies

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49
Sphinn It!

Went Hot: Nov 28, 2008 - 08:56 pm
Posted By: steaprok 477 Days ago
Source: http://www.sugarrae.com
Category: Social Media

An extremely informative post on customizing the Thesis Wordpress theme with hooks. "Users who don’t know CSS or PHP have more control with the new thesis them than with any other theme I’ve ever seen."

6 Comments

Comments

from DazzlinDonna 477 Days ago #

Votes: 0

Rae did a great job with this and I commend her on it. However, it would definitely make me stay away from Thesis. I’m a geeky gal, and I can certainly understand Rae’s excellent instructions, but I won’t want to. I shouldn’t have to work so hard, ya know? I totally "get" that with great customizability comes some compromises, but heck, I might as well just muck around in a theme’s code, if i’m going to have to go through the trouble of defining a bunch of functions and hooks just to do simple things like changing a header image and add some social networking buttons.I posted this comment here, rather than on the blog post, because I don’t want to take away from Rae’s efforts. Obviously, anyone who already owns Thesis will be grateful for the post, as well they should be. But man, it definitely makes me say, "i’ll pass" to spending money on it.

from Sugarrae 477 Days ago #

Votes: 0

>>>I might as well just muck around in a theme’s code, if i’m going to have to go through the trouble of defining a bunch of functions and hooks just to do simple things like changing a header image and add some social networking buttons.You could have posted on my blog. :)See, the thing is, once you do the hooks, they’re done. So, you can switch from a 3 column template on the right, to a two column template, to a three column on the left template, to a 3 column template with the content in the center - all with the same theme. With any other theme, if you want to change your layout, you’re going to have to REDO the code hacking you did in every single template to do it.Additionally, Thesis does a lot of stuff that you USED to need plugins to do that you don’t with Thesis (such as Title tags). The advertising capabilities (which I am doing a tutorial on next week) rock. You can also change all of your font and massive amounts of "typical wordpress" things (show the category, don’t show the category, show the author name, don’t show the author name, show all pages in the header, only show these five pages in the header, show full posts on the category pages, seperate from how you show on the index pages, only show excerpts on the category pages) without ever touching a line of code.Really, to me, I do the work once and after that, my blog can be an absolute chameleon with Thesis... any other theme, you have to start completely over.

from seofactor 477 Days ago #

Votes: 0

Though I’m with Donna on her opinion; if you are going to start to get into customizing, might as well get into Drupal. Way more functionality potential, but way un-user-friendly. However, even as code heavy as this may seem to someone who isn’t used to it, it is nowhere near that of a platform like Drupal. It just looks that way because it might be new. All you need is someone to write a good tutorial and eyes start to open. For it’s intent, this post was incredible. So, it seems, all I have to do is convince Rae to take up Drupal and write tuts for that. Awesome job, Rae.

from cre8pc 476 Days ago #

Votes: 0

Faced with the choice of Drupal, other WP themes or Thesis for two new web sites I needed to get done quickly, and to update one more, I settled on Thesis and have no regrets. I want Drupal for one site but I need to learn it first. Thesis is 90% done "out of the box". I have 2 blogs running it now and no hooks yet. The hooks are just more toys to play with.

from doncampbell 474 Days ago #

Votes: 0

I really liked this article. I’ve been learning Thesis hooks and still learned a bunch from it. @Donna - there is a new WP plugin called OpenHook that makes it a little easier to add code to hooks in the WP Admin panels. After reading Rae’s tutorial to understand the "hooks" concept, and then using this plugin you can customize Thesis pretty easily, and without coding.@seofactor - I’ve done some projects with Drupal and with WordPress. I respect Drupal. But definitely prefer using WordPress for my projects. To me Drupal makes everything very complicated and I don’t see what I get out of it that I can’t do with WP + plugins. Not trying to start a war here, I respect it but don’t think its the right platform for someone who isn’t ready to get into taxonomies and PHP code.Anyway, great article Rae!