Thesis 2.0, the long promised update has finally arrived. A few days ago the world finally got to see what Chris Pearson has been working on for the last couple of years, and if you were expecting an incremental approach to Thesis 2.0, forget that notion right now. Thesis 2.0 is a whole different animal!
Initially, that might frighten you as you probably had to work hard to learn how to get to grips with Thesis 1.8.x, and you’re just starting to feel comfortable with it. But once you have a walk through the new interface and design, I think Thesis 2.0 will grow on you much much more quickly than the 1.8.x series ever did.
One of the wonderful new features Chris has given us is the Thesis Template Editor. This is essentially, a “Block Manager” to easily rearrange the pieces of your layout using drag and drop. I have used this type of a layout editor before in several high end shopping cart applications I use in my eCommerce businesses and the power of it is, you really can build almost any layout you could imagine with a block manager. Believe me, this COOL stuff! (When I laid eyes on this I think I squealed like a 5-year old kid finding an enormous box under the Christmas tree.)
Consider at some of the cool things you can do with the new Thesis 2.0 template editor:
- Have you ever wanted to add a secondary nav menu to your layout? No problem. Just add another menu block to your template, and fill it with a different defined WordPress menu.
- Don’t like where the nav menus are showing up? No need to get up to your armpits in code and use a hook to move it around. Just open the template, pick the menu section up with your mouse and move it.
- Wish there was a different place for widgets ? No problem, just add another block for them to sit in.
And there are mountains of other cool features in Thesis 2.0 that I will cover in upcoming days, as there are just too many features to cover in one 5-minute video. So please enjoy this introduction to Thesis 2.0 and watch for my next tutorial soon.
If you have comments or questions about the video, please enter them in the comments box below.