Just a quick post to say that I have mastered Thesis version 1.6b - despite my earlier concerns about the changing of the “#nav” tags to “.menu“. I manually uploaded the files via ftp (rather than using the auto-upgrade button in the dashboard) and everything worked as it should.
I just upgraded Tranquility HQ to Thesis version 1.6b and have incorporated the drop down nav menus - so easy!
Evolution Premium Theme for WordPress
I was trying the Premium Theme “Evolution” out on this site – for about two weeks. Evolution has built in drop down navigation menus and a nifty slider image box.
Below is a screenshot of what Tranquility HQ’s home page looked like with the Evolution Theme before the move back to Thesis Theme. If you clicked on the arrows to the right of the top image, it would scroll to the next feature article excerpt and image, from the center of the page out to the left and right edges.
- I modified the header with a very basic logo image but had difficulty controlling the Recent and Popular post tabs and the pages that appeared in the nav menu.
- The dashboard was not overly user-friendly and forced you to display your About and Contact details or your Flickr account thumbnails.
- So, you had to choose to give up valuable page property or give visitors a chance to click away the second they arrive on your home page, say “Pretty picture…” and click away never to come back.
- To modify the top blue, you can choose from red and green as alternate colors (from memory) or if you want to modify it and make it unique you have to change at least three image files and find where to include them in the theme files. No hooks to help out!
Here is a screenshot of a blog post/page on Tranquility HQ, under the Evolution theme. Nice image handling – the theme resized the images for you as long as you inserted the url of the uploaded image into a custom field and used the “image” and “url” field tags. If you forgot to do this, no picture appeared to preview your post.
- While the functionality was quite good, the feautred articles sliding image box on the front page didn’t work as reliably as the Thesis Theme multimedia box and there was no easy way to customize your image and nav menus.
- I also had to accept a static page for the front page and a blog tab for the rest. There were probably ways around it for code savvy individuals but I still find Thesis easier to customize.
As I’ve mentioned often, I’m a self-taught hacker. Not the cracking into things necessarily. More the butchering kind. My best friends are Ctrl+Z (undo) and copy & paste (the orginal code before I messed with it).
- At the end of the day, what I wanted for Tranquility HQ was a beautiful, unique site with a rotating image box. Voila! Thesis Theme comes to the party again.
Earlier Versions of Tranquility HQ using Thesis Theme
Screenshots of previous designs for Tranquility HQ using Thesis Theme are below. When there are so many layout options and customizing tweaks you can make, it is difficult to be satisfied as you learn more about design and hacking code.
Your feedback is most welcome. Feel free to visit Tranquility HQ and let me know what you think about the new design – using Thesis Theme (again).
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