I’ve been playing with websites since before the Web was born – of course they weren’t called “websites” back then. FORTRAN, COBOL, BASIC – I grew up in the punch-card and Commodore 64 cassette-tape-drive eras. So, I’m not a total technophobe.

That being said, I totally see how Thesis is often misrepresented by its fans. Sure, it’s a whiz once you learn the new “language”, but that language takes time. It isn’t as user-friendly as one is led to believe, at least not when the user wants something other than the same-old boxy, grid-like layout for their site.

Yes, there are skins available. For the most part, they all look the same. Free or premium, doesn’t matter. You can spy a Thesis-framed site a mile away – what does THAT say about uniqueness?

Sure, it has advantages. Good SEO out of the box, admin panels are awesome – but sometimes TOO many choices is just as confusing as too few. I truly cannot see how a rank beginner would profit from Thesis, other than to have bragging rights.

In years past, I hacked my HTML and CSS to pieces – with decent results. As you mention, it didn’t take long. These hooks and calls are a different beast – again, not for beginners.

Thanks again for the honest opinion – it’s appreciated.

I know Thesis advertises its speed, but how can it be faster than a regular theme, when it has tens of extra files that are included using php, lots of custom hooks and fuctions, and so on?

The main reason to Thesis “popularity” is its affiliate program in my opinion. It’s not a bad theme at all, but it’s not worth the hype.

I’d say check out the Suffusion design as well as Thesis.

Are you kidding me?!?

You can get a custom skin for Thesis for a LOT cheaper than an entire theme and then you get to keep the great back end of Thesis.

As a techy and someone who has done customizations on the Thesis theme for my clients – I feel thesis is good if you are fine with the standard layouts provided in the theme.

If you have further customizations – it better off getting someone to code it from scratch. The “dashboard customizations” don’t go far enough for non-techy people.

Thanks for this discussion. I have been contemplating buying the Thesis theme for a while now but haven’t pulled the trigger – $80 for a theme when there are so many nice free or cheaper ones out there?

While I am by no means a newbie, I’m also not a coder. So I’ve been getting tired of making tweaks all the time to my theme instead of doing what I should be doing – writing and researching. Nevertheless, this post makes some good points. I don’t want to have to spend even MORE time figuring out which file to manipulate if I need some additional customization.

I think what is going to keep me from making the leap into the cult of Thesis is the fact that I can spot a Thesis themed site from a mile away now. And frankly that is starting to bore me. ( Though I do appreciate Chris Pearson’s work and even used his old theme Cutline for a while.)

So, all that said, what do you guys think about themes from Studio Press or other theme companies? What about any Theme Forest themes with custom front-end options?

I think Thesis is the just the beginning of awesomely designed, work-from-the-dashboard themes. I’m looking forward to what comes next!

That said

Thesis seems pretty handy dandy to use, but the problem is that if another blog uses thesis, then there are so many blogs that look a like which then takes away from the originality no?

I was/am considering the Thesis Theme but it is incredibly hard to get an honest review when everyone is trying to cash in on the affiliate links to the extent it is obvious there is a Cult of the Thesis.

Thanks for the honest review, your review along with a few others leads me to believe I would be over my head if I got the Thesis Theme and wanted major customisation. Cheers.

But… I am an IT Manager. I have experience with PHP, CSS, HTML, FTP, WP, and blogging in general – so that gives me a serious leg up on the average Joe.

That’s not to say that the average Joe couldn’t use Thesis and enjoy it… they could very easily – they would just be limited in the design changes they could make “easily” – which I believe is the point of this post… which I happen to agree with.

If I was to pitch Thesis to someone looking to buy a theme, I would definitely tell them how much I adore it, but then also tell them that they should be ready to learn some web programming if they really want to “make it their own.”

Honestly… I don’t see the argument here – you’re all right. Thesis is awesome, can deliver immense power, can be hard to code for the non-coder, and is over hyped due to a rich affiliate program.

All I know is, I love it and REALLY appreciate the upgradability… especially after coming from a WooTheme. Ugh – upgrading those was a total PITA, and it seemed like something on the theme broke with each WP release, so I had to manually upgrade multiple files each and every time. Not so with Thesis… and boy is that a breath of fresh aiir for this IT guy Thesis fan boy!

Godspeed.

I ended up dropping the code into the thesis_hook_before_header and then positioning it from there. The styling was actually kind of a bitch (perhaps due to my lack of skillz), and once I got everything looking like I wanted, the links didn’t work. Why? Well, it turns out that they were buried under the “menu.” I eventually figured this out and changed the stack order to put it on top (after first teaching myself how to do it).

I’m sure this is standard stuff for CSS jockeys, but Thesis is being marketed as a great solution for “non-coders.” While I’m far from a pro when it comes to this stuff, I’m also not completely inept. On the plus side, I learned something about CSS and I probably ended up with a more “elegant” solution than I would’ve otherwise put together. On the minus side…

In pretty much every other them that I’ve worked with, I could’ve easily hacked those things into the template exactly where and how I wanted them in about 5 minutes. Would it have been less elegant on the back end? Almost certainly. But it would’ve been fast and functional, which is what I typically look for when it comes to these things.

So there you go. Feel free to fire away and tell me that I’m an idiot for not being able to achieve this stuff in the blink of an eye, but… Like I said above, Thesis is being marketed to non-coders. Just because something is easy for you doesn’t mean it will be easy for everyone in the target audience. Don’t believe me? Take a look at the very first comment on this post – a blog consultant who regularly gets e-mails from clients who can’t figure out how Thesis works.

I’ve obviously touched a nerve here, but I’m simply trying to point out to people that Thesis isn’t all rainbows and lollipops like so many of the rah rah, affiliate-driven reviews will lead you to believe. While I’m learning to deal with the quirks, the phrase “man, this sucks” often rolls through my head when tweaking things. That sentiment is less frequent now than it used to be, but I obviously still haven’t mastered Thesis.

In anticipation of the question: Why do you stick with it? – The short answer is that I’ve arrived at a design that I’m reasonably happy with, so there’s no sense in throwing it all away. If I knew at the start what I know now, however, I would’ve gone another direction and wound up at largely the same place with less aggravation.

Of course, this is just my opinion based on my own personal experiences. YMMV, etc., etc., etc.

Can you please give me a real example of a time that you had “to spend an hour making a fairly [simple] modification that would only take a few minutes if directly editing the theme files themselves.”

Since then my opinion of Thesis has improved and I’ve become much more proficient with the theme. I call it a theme, but it’s actually a framework which requires the user to dress it up to their specifications afterwards. I think Thesis makes a lot of things easier to tweak, but I think some things are still easier to do in “normal” themes.