Friday, October 23, 2009

WordPress THESIS: AVOID

Well, this Texas boy had himself a very aggravating morning this second to last Friday of October. A couple days ago someone dangled money in front of me to get me to figure out a WordPress blog theme thing called THESIS.

I was about 2 minutes in when I decided THESIS was a piece of outdated junk that belongs back in 1999.

But, for reasons unfathomable to me, there are blogging gurus who swear THESIS is the best blogging thing in the world. And I know simple saps who listen, without critical questioning, to blogging gurus, and then buy in to what they are selling. So, THESIS gets bought.

I'll tell you how bad this piece of junk is. The BIG problem was the THESIS user could not figure out how to upload their logo to their THESIS blog. This is a rather elemental part of any publishing software I've ever used, be it blogging or print. The ability to easily insert an image where you want it.

But not with THESIS. Logo uploading is among the many missing features. To upload a logo in THESIS I had to search for a solution. The THESIS style sheet had to be altered with code injected.

No big deal. Been there, done that before. So, I'm logged into THESIS. I open the custom.css file. I copy the code. I save the file.

However, THESIS, upon saving, changed a key part of the code from 880 pixels to 8800 pixels. Trust me, that creates problems. So, I delete the extra 0 and save again. Nope. Still there. I delete all the code and save again. Nope. Still there.

I've been down this type road enough times that I know to backup a copy before altering. So, I went through several steps and used FTP to overwrite the file that the idiotic THESIS thing would not save correctly.

By that time it was 10 in the morning. I'd missed my morning swim. I'd been up fiddling with this stupid thing since 5am.

And now I was mad. Which means I was gonna keep at it til I got the stupid logo to work.

It all had to be done outside the criminally bad THESIS mess, using Windows Notepad and FTP. By 11am I had the logo uploaded and on the blog.

Six hours to do something that would take me all of 20 seconds using the blogger system I'm using to write this blog.

If I've not been clear enough, let me be clearer.

THESIS SUCKS!

5 comments:

  1. I have some issues with Thesis myself, but I've never had the problems you described to get a logo placed in there.

    My issues are more focused on bloat and streamlining.

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  2. You found an easy way to add a header logo?

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  3. I always just enter the html/css for the logo either by hard coding it into the custom functions file or by using the OpenHook plugin.

    The OpenHook plugin makes editing Thesis really easy, but I've been moving away from it lately in favor of just coding in the functions manually.

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  4. Thesis doesn't suck. It's like driving a manual transmission car versus an automatic. It gives you more power and more flexibility. You won't get it until you work through that initial hurdle.

    Anyway, if you want to add a logo to Thesis, it's pretty simple: http://www.customizethesis.com/adding-a-logo-to-your-header/

    If you want to add a header image, that is also pretty simple:
    http://www.customizethesis.com/how-to-add-a-custom-header-to-your-thesis-website/

    ~ mel

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