New Look for CTTS: Thesis [en]

A few weeks ago Suw mentioned that she was looking at the Thesis theme for her sites. I went to have a look, and it looked nice and clean. Only problem: it wasn’t free.

However, the theme author, Chris Pearson (not to be confused with Cris Pearson), was offering a lifetime subscription to the theme and support, as well as use on unlimited sites for the developer version ($164), which I bought.

The result is what you see now on the site. I haven’t modified it much yet. Here are a few things I liked.

First, you can control the top navigation menu bar completely (look at how much stuff I put in it — maybe a bit too much). It wraps nicely when you put more items than fit in one line. You can add links to pages in your site, or to outside pages. This also allows me to link to the page named About Me and This Site with the simple word “About”. Basically, this achieves the same thing as the “redirect to” page template that I’m using on the Going Solo site, for example.

Second, you can tweak the width of your columns. The default width for the main content column in Thesis is 480px. Given I insert many medium-sized Flickr photos (500px wide), I widened it. No need to fool with the CSS, Thesis does it all in the background.

Third, the image rotator. Up right, you can see one of my photographs, and when you click on it, it will take you to the Flickr page it lives on. I’ll explain how I did this in a separate post.

At one point, I added a header image, which I now removed because I think it doesn’t go well with the images in the multimedia box up right. Here is the code I used (in the custom.css stylesheet), if ever it comes in handy to anybody.

.custom #header {
background: url("/wp/wp-content/themes/thesis/images/ouchy-header.jpg")
repeat-x top left;height: 160px; }
.custom #header #tagline {color: black;}
.custom #header {paddint-top: 1.5em;}