One question I always get asked is how to change the way Thesis displays the number of comments for a post. By default, Thesis displays the number in curly brackets like this:

{ 0 } comments.

I am personally not a fan of how this looks, but fortunately Thesis makes this extremely easy to customize.

First open custom_functions.php and add this line to the bottom

remove_action('thesis_hook_after_post', 'thesis_comments_link');

This will remove the default Thesis number of comments display. Now to add your own custom look, add the following to the same file.

function custom_comments_link() {
  if (!is_single() && !is_page()) {
    echo '<p class="to_comments"><a href="';
    the_permalink();
    echo '#comments" rel="nofollow">';
    comments_number(__('<span>0</span> comments', 'thesis'), __('<span>1</span> comment', 'thesis'), __('<span>%</span> comments', 'thesis'));
    echo '</a> </p>';
  }
}
 
add_action('thesis_hook_after_post', 'custom_comments_link');

Basically, this is the same code as before, but without the curly brackets. You can then use the to_comments css class to customize the number of comments look to your liking.

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To really customize Thesis the way you want to, you need to understand Thesis hooks. At first glance, hooks seem like a daunting concept to learn, but they really are quite simple. In this article, let me explain to you what Thesis hooks are, and how to take advantage of them on your site.

Hooks themselves are a WordPress concept. They were added into WP to provide plugin developers a way to call their own custom functions at specific times. There are actually two different types of hooks, Actions and Filters. Actions occur are hooks that are called at specific points in time or when a specific event happens. So there’s a WordPress hook called publish_post, and if you add your action to that hook, it will be called whenever someone publishes a post on the site. Filters are slightly different. They are called when WordPress is doing something with data (ie. text) like displaying it on the screen or saving it to the database. This allows you to add your own filters to modify the data in your own specific way. For example, you could add your own filter which would link to the Thesis homepage whenever it sees the word “Thesis” in a post.

There are hundreds of built in WordPress hooks, but they’re not particularly helpful for customizing Thesis itself. That’s why, Thesis has added it’s own set of Thesis hooks that makes modifying the theme very simple.

Lets solidify this with an example. Take the Thesis banner I’ve added to the top of the site. To do this, I first browsed through the Thesis hooks list and decided that thesis_hook_before_content would be the appropriate hook to use. You can also use the visual hooks reference at thesishooks.com which is a handy resource as well. Once we know which hook to use, open up your custom_functions.php file and add the following code.

function top_banner() { ?>
	<img src="http://thesisthemetutorial.com/images/thesis468x60.png"/>
<?php
}
 
add_action('thesis_hook_before_content', 'top_banner');

Add_action is a php function that takes 2 arguments, the hook name and a function. You can see I’m calling a function called top_banner and inside the function, all I’m doing is displaying my banner image. While this is really a trivial example, it really is this simple. By finding the appropriate Thesis hooks to use, you can pretty much customize the theme however you want.

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Installing Thesis is quite simple. In this Thesis Theme tutorial, I’m going to show you how to install Thesis onto your blog. This assumes you’ve already installed WordPress already, but if you haven’t, check out this WordPress installation tutorial.

Downloading Thesis Theme

The first thing you will need to do is download is download the latest version of the Thesis Theme. After your purchase, you should have received an email detailing your username and password and a link to your personal membership page. Login to your account and you can find a download link on the right. Alternatively, and you can download Thesis using this download link.

Installing Thesis Theme

1. The thesis download will be in zip format, so you will first need to extract it. Mac users can just double-click to extract. Windows users can extract the file using a free utility like 7zip. Once it’s extracted, you should have a folder called thesis_16 on your local computer.
2. Next, you’ll need to upload this thesis folder to the server. For that you’ll need a free FTP program like Cyberduck (Mac) or WinSCP (Windows).



3. Login to your server using the credentials from your webhost, and navigate to your wordpress install. You’ll want to upload your extracted thesis folder to the wp-content/themes subdirectory.
4. Once all the files have been uploaded, it’s time to Activate your copy of Thesis. Login to your WordPress admin panel, and go to Appearance > Themes on the left hand menu. Look for Thesis under Available Themes and select the activate link. Voila! You’re now using Thesis.
5. One last thing. Go back into your ftp program and navigate over to wp-content/themes/thesis_16 and rename the custom-sample folder to custom. Now you can use the Thesis custom stylesheet and custom functions to tweak Thesis to your hearts content.

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I recently had to upgrade one of my older Thesis 1.5 installs to Thesis 1.6. Here are the steps to do it.

1. In your existing Thesis install, make a backup of your custom folder and any images you may have added to your rotator folder
2. Upload the new thesis_16 folder to your wp-content/themes directory.
3. Rename the custom-sample folder to custom
4. Copy the contents of your backed up custom folder to the new custom folder. Don’t overwrite the folder! Just copy the contents only.
5. If necessary, copy the images from your backed up rotator folder to the new custom/rotator folder
6. Log in to your WordPress Dashboard, and select the new Thesis 1.6 theme to activate

One thing to note is that the navigation menu has been significantly reworked in Thesis 1.6. If you have done any nav menu customizations to your previous Thesis install, you will probably be affected by these changes. If you need any help with this after you upgrade, visit the Thesis forums and someone will help you out.

As you can see, it is relatively simple to perform a Thesis 1.6 upgrade. Don’t delay if you are still using an older Thesis install.

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