The Comprehensive Thesis Theme for WordPress Review

What do LaVar Burton, Copyblogger and this blog all have in common?

We’re all rocking the Thesis theme (and you’d better believe that’s an affiliate link).

Over the last year, Thesis has taken the WordPress community by storm, quickly becoming the premium theme of choice of many top bloggers.

While it certainly doesn’t hurt to have people like Darren Rowse (TwiTip), Brian Clark (Copyblogger), Matt Cutts (Google egineer), and Chris Brogan using and promoting your theme. But, if you know anything about these bloggers (or myself for that matter) you kow they won’t promote a product that they don’t strongly believe in.

So what is it about Thesis that makes it so special? We’ll take a look in our second installment of WordPress Theme Reviews.

Design

The “out of the box” Thesis design is one of the most clean & crisp designs you’ll find.

It’s minimalistic look and feel assures your content is always the center of attention.

There’s no denying that WooThemes’ 36 different themes are a more diverse offering out of the box. Their image heavy designs are a stark contrast to Thesis’ sleek default design.

However, Thesis incorporates the site’s title and description into the design so you don’t have to create an image for each new site as you do with Woo.

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Flexibility

The flexibility of Thesis is where this theme out-classes every other theme on the market.

With just a click of the mouse you can go from a 2 to 3 column design and move those columns to the right or left sidebars.

Another built in option allows you to use featured posts, post teasers, or a mixture of the two. WPblogger for example doesn’t make use of the teaser function. MLBrumorblog on the other hand, relies solely on teasers. And, as you can see from the screen shots below, those are just a couple of the plethora of options Thesis gives you in the theme dashboard.

When you begin to consider the added flexibility Thesis offers through its use of custom.css and custom_functions.php files, the possibilities become nearly endless.

Want to add one of those fancy sliders to your home page that WooThemes uses in several of their themes? You can, as proven by Michael Gray on his SEO blog.

Would you like to utilize the 3 column widgetized footers that seem to be all the rage with blogs over the last year or so? Alex Frasier does just that on his young entrepreneur blog. Basically, you can replicate practically any look or feature of other themes utilizing the Thesis framework.

If you have any doubt about the utterly incredible flexibility of this theme, take a stroll through their showcase and check out the amazing diversity.

In all honesty, since I’ve purchased a developer license of Thesis, the only reason I’ve found to buy other themes has been this series of theme review posts.

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Ease of Use

While Thesis does have a plethora of options to figure out, they are, for the most part, self explanatory.

Now, there is a bit of a learning curve once you get into making serious customizations. But, you’re not really learning Thesis per-say, you’re actually learning CSS and PHP to use within the Thesis framework.

What you learn while customizing your site, is applicable to any site built with CSS. And of course, if you already know CSS and/or PHP you’ll probably find Thesis a breeze to use.

For those of us who aren’t CSS inclined, the free Thesis OpenHook plugin is immensely helpful and, among other things, allows you to make customizations within the WordPress dashboard. Since nearly all the customizations take place in either the custom.css or custom_functions.php file, swapping, sharing, and testing code is incredibly easy.

And, if you decide you don’t want to take the time to learn, there are a growing number of skins (ready made custom.css and custom_functions.php files) available that are easily applied to your Thesis installation to customize the design.

All in all, I would consider Thesis fairly easy to use. You can customize your design with a minimal amount of effort and if you get stuck, there plenty of places to turn for help. Which, conveniently, brings us to our next category…

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Support

Customer support is yet another area where Thesis checks in at the head of the class. The theme of course, comes with a manual to get you started and there’s a very active support forum where every one from beginner to expert congregates to ask questions and help with any issues that you may encounter.

And, if that’s not enough to quench your appetite for support, there are an increasing number of Thesis tutorials that walk you step by step through all sorts of customizations. The tutorials stretch from how to add a header image, to how to create a Gawker type carousel, to using different ads for pages of different topics.

If there’s something cool you want to do with Thesis, chances are there’s already a tutorial for it. And if not, I’m willing to bet someone in the forum can show you how it’s done.

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Total Rating

I’ve used countless themes in my blogging career, and even helped design and sell one, and Thesis has an answer for almost every issue I’d encountered with any other theme.

The flexibility is unparalleled and the community surrounding is both knowledgeable and helpful. The price tag isn’t cheap ($87 for personal use, $164 for developer) but there are no monthly fees to remain a member and updates are free.

Look, if it seems like I am falling all over myself to say good things about Thesis, that’s because I am.

It is, quite simply, the best WordPress theme available, coming in at an impressive 9 out of 10 stars.

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