Last week, Chris Pearson released Thesis 1.8 to the world. It includes a bunch of exciting new features that makes Thesis even easier to work with. It was painless to upgrade this site to the new version and I’m really liking some of the new changes. Below are my favorite Thesis features of this new release.

New Header Image Uploader – The best way to distinguish your site from other Thesis site’s is to add your own custom header image. Thesis 1.8 introduces a new Header Image menu item where you can upload you own custom header with a click of a button. What’s nice is that it also tells you the optimal image width for your header based on your current layout options.

Meta Field Character Counts – For anyone into SEO, you know how important it is to write good title and meta description fields. However, each search engine limits the amount of characters to display for each. Now Thesis 1.8 keeps track of the character count for these two fields so you will fit these constraints. A small thing, but really useful!

New Google Fonts – Thesis 1.8 now supports 28 additional fonts from the Google Font Directory. Each of these fonts is web-safe, so everyone will be able to see them correctly.

WordPress 3.0 Menu Support – If you haven’t played around with the new WordPress 3.0 menu support, you are really missing out. It’s a superior method of customizing your navigation menus the way you like them. With Thesis 1.8, you can now choose between using the standard Thesis menus or WordPress 3.0 menus. No matter which style you choose, you can still tweak how they look through the Thesis nav menu controls.

New Category SEO Options – With Thesis 1.8, you can now customize the titles and descriptions for each of your category and tag pages. This really useful for SEO purposes if you silo your sites in this way.

Favicon Uploader – Works almost like the new header image uploader. It’s a very simple way to setup a favicon for your site which is extremely important for branding purposes.

Thesis Custom Loop API – Thesis 1.8 now allows you to include custom html/php inside the content of any page on your site. For anyone that know how to code, this gives you unparalleled flexibility for your designs.

If you haven’t purchased Thesis yet, what are you waiting for? As you can see, Thesis is constantly evolving and some great new stuff is being added to each new release.

Download Thesis 1.8 Now

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It took a little longer than we thought, but Thesis 1.7 was just released today. So what’s new in this latest version of Thesis?

• Thesis 1.7 is faster and more efficient. Developer Chris Pearson has rewritten a significant portion of the code to make things noticeably faster. You should see the page load times in the options pages to be much snappier then previous versions of Thesis.
• New Options Manager. Now you can backup your Thesis settings and even better, reuse your settings across all your Thesis installs.
• More SEO options. Although previous versions of Thesis were already SEO optimized, Thesis 1.7 includes some great new customization options that give you more control. Now you can set separate meta tags (noindex, nofollow, no archive) for every post and page on your blog. The new Page Options also gives you full control over your category and tag pages.
• Reorganized Options Pages. There are now five main pages in Thesis 1.7. Site Options, Design Options, Page Options, Custom File Editor and the Options Manager. Everything has been reorganized so that things are easier to find.
• Included Javascript libraries. Now your favorite javascript libraries like JQuery, Prototype, and Mootools are available right out of the box.
• New Comment Options. Now you can more easily tweak the way your comments appear.
• Easy 301 Redirects. Great for people who want to mask their affiliate links

These are some of the new features of Thesis 1.7. I’ve already upgraded this site to the new version and I’m playing around with the new features right now. If you haven’t tried Thesis yet, now is the time to get on board.

Download Thesis 1.7

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