Upgrades to WordPress and the Thesis theme

A new version of WordPress was released last week and I’ve upgraded this blog to that version, 2.8.5. As always, I followed my 6 tips to upgrading WordPress to ensure a smooth and trouble-free upgrade.

The WordPress developers say that 2.8.5 is a hardening release as it tightens up on some security areas. As with all such security-related releases, you ought to upgrade if you run WordPress.

If you’re a regular visitor here, you might notice some differences in how the site looks. Nothing radical – no new design – just some tweaking that I’ve had in mind for a while but couldn’t figure out how to do until now.

I’ve been using the Thesis theme for WordPress on all my blogs for over a year. It’s a premium theme and you have to purchase a license. I have the developer license which lets me use Thesis on multiple sites.

The latest version 1.6 was released last week, which I’ve upgraded to here – and it rocks. I like developer Chris Pearson’s elevator pitch description of this new version:

Thesis is unique because it solves a wide array of problems that affect everyone who runs a website. In addition to conquering mission-critical tasks like SEO, site speed, and layout flexibility, version 1.6 now offers design controls that allow you to change the look of your site—think colors, borders, and backgrounds—without touching a bit of code (not even copying and pasting CSS!).

So finally, it’s easier to do things like change the width of the page area, add another sidebar, change fonts and sizes, and lots more, all without knowing anything about PHP or CSS – just choose options from the Thesis admin pages within the Wordpress dashboard. Of course, if you do know CSS and coding in particular, then you have even richer opportunities to customize your Thesis to the maximum extent.

The new feature that attracted my interest most is the drop-down menus you can enable in the primary navigation system you see at the top of each page, above the header image. I’ll be re-doing that nav system soon.

So a bit more tweaking to come as I get to know Thesis better.

(By the way, none of the links above to Thesis contains affiliate or hidden codes of any type: if you click and go, it’s a standard web page link. I get no referrer fee if you click. Just wanted to be transparent and clear about that.)

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Tagged as: Thesis, WordPress, WordPress theme