Since Thesis version 1.2, we in the Thesis Community have found out about ‘hooks‘. Tricky little things at first but once mastered you can design like a pro.
- Add the Thesis OpenHook Plugin a few trusty diagrams to help you remember where the hooks go/live and you can copy and paste words, images and other smart things all over your pages like a Pro.
1. Grab the Thesis OpenHook Plugin
Thesis OpenHook is a plugin that will allow you to fully customize your Thesis installation without touching your custom/custom_functions.php file unless you just really want to!
OpenHook adds a new panel to your administration panel’s Design area — in addition to Thesis Options & Design Options, OpenHook creates a new Thesis OpenHook panel.
Grab it via your Dashboard (automatic plugin installer) or grab it direct from the source, KingdomGeek.
Here is a screenshot below showing a portion of the very long options panel (something for virtually every part of your Thesis Theme).
2. Grab trusty ‘hook’ diagrams
Then a trusty diagram that shows you were the hooks go/live on the home page, pages and posts. Thebest diagrams in existance (to my knowledge as at 8 April 2009 :-) ) are at Robert Gerola‘s site
3. Additional Thesis Hook Tutorials & Videos
- A video by Thesis Hooks.com
- Thesis Tutorial – Hooks for Dummies by Sugarrae.com
- Thesis Hook Reference List at DIYthemes.com
{ 12 comments… read them below or add one }
Excellent post. The hooks are one of the best features of the thesis theme. Once you master the hooks, which is not hard. You will be well on your way to having a nice Thesis Theme site.
Not hard but very annoying when you all you want to do is change the markup on the search results page and you can’t find any reference to it anywhere.
Having the same issue, the I’m new to Thesis from Hybrid and this is very easy to customize in an open theme…any luck with a hook to customize the SERP?
Depending on what you are wanting to do, I would suggest you search the Thesis forum, perhaps using the search term ‘headway’, ‘SERP’.
I have gone through a couple of posts in this blog. According to me, this site is a benchmark in the list of thesis related sites.
.-= Glycemic Index Chart´s last blog ..Testing Interactive GI Diet Plans =-.
The OpenHook plugin for Thesis Theme is one of the must have’s if you’re going to be tweaking your blog. Some of us like playing around more than others, and this is a must have for the tweaker running Thesis Theme for WordPress.
The Hooks for Dummies tutorial is well worth viewing, as the title pretty much sums it up. Once you get the hang of it, hooks are a remarkably effective and simple design solution.
Hi there – do you know how to make hooks conditional depending on whether it is a page or a post? I’m trying to show a custom graphic ONLY on pages. I’ve got the hook & function working fine, but it also shows up on posts templates (as it would since I’m using thesis_hook_after_post_box I guess but I couldn’t see anything specific to pages only. There has to be a way though … :)).
From another Aussie …
Try this thread in the Thesis forum. Basically, I think you just need to add a conditional statement like “….if(is_page() )..” in your custom_function. This is my interpretation of the is_single() usage as referred to in the thread.
It seems to work with widget logic plugin on text widgets that you only want to appear on pages. You can also include the page ID. More instructions are in the thread.
You can also look at the is_page() hook at the WordPress codex site. It gives you good instructions on how to use it with examples.
Failing that, I would post another question in the forum. Let me know how you get on.
Thanks Somone – yes that worked. I was also able to use an (array) to set it to be ONLY certain pages!
Many thanks for the great info on your site.
Robert
Hi, Thanks for this post and also thanks for adding this tutorial video. I want to make Thisis theme for my blog and I am not a profession in this. That’s why I was searching the information about open hook plugin and I reached here.
Thanks for the great post about the thesis theme. I’m looking forward to reading a lot more of your site in the future.
Just bought Thesis for a few days and still looking around for a useful hints on hooks and functions for a newbie come non-technical guy like me.
Thankfully I’ve managed to discover your site. A simple yet meaningful guidance for me to start loving my thesis theme and make it worth every penny I’ve spent!