by Michael Wong on April 20, 2009
I use WordPress to power this blog and use the permalink option of %category% to create SEO-friendly URLs.
But it has one major limitation: it uses the category with the lowest category ID to create the permalink.
This is okay if you only select one category. But if you select two or more categories, the category with the lowest ID isn’t always the category you want to appear in the permalink URL.
Luckily for me and probably many other WordPress users, Dmytro Shteflyuk encountered the same problem and created the sCategory Permalink plugin to overcome this issue. With this plugin you can select as many categories as you like for a post and select the category you want to use in the permalink.
I just installed it on this blog (WordPress 2.7.1) and it works great! Thanks Dmytro! Dymytro, you should add a tip form to your site so that I can buy you a beer.
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by Michael Wong on April 17, 2009
When my techie guru, Peter Cooper, installed WordPress on my server for me, he recommended that I get Thesis Theme for WordPress.
Peter rarely recommends commercial software and I wasn’t sure I wanted to pay $87 (Personal Option), let alone $164 (Developer’s Option), for some site theme that I could create myself or ‘borrow’ from somewhere. So I asked him why he recommended it.
He told me, “It’s just a really great base theme to work from. It’s what the default WordPress theme really should be. Very easy to customize, good practices out of the box, lots of design settings you can make without needing to touch code.”
Hmm… that sounded interesting but I still wasn’t totally convinced that I should shell out $164 so I did a bit more digging. I came across a video created by a happy customer and promoted on the Thesis Theme web site where she explains in her own words why she loves Thesis Theme.
What Thesis Theme offers is more than just a WordPress theme. It’s a point and click system to help you customize the look and feel of your blog, by editing the layout, navigation links, fonts, display options, etc., without having to touch the CSS or HTML code. I was sold!
I have years of experience with HTML but my CSS knowledge is quite basic, so this sounded good to me. I went with the Developer’s Option because it allows me to use Thesis on every site that I own, and I don’t have to retain the attribution link in the footer (I just didn’t like the idea of paying for the software and giving the author a link as well).
A word of warning: The Developer’s Option allows you to use Thesis on an unlimited number of sites that ‘you’ own. It doesn’t allow you to use it on your clients’ web sites. For that privilege you have to pay $40 per site. This option is only available in the Developer’s Option.
The Personal Option only allows you to use Thesis on one site and on a localized development server. The footer attribution link must remain intact. You may however upgrade to the Developer’s Option from the Personal Option for $77.
I’m no techie but I installed Thesis Theme onto my server myself by following their easy to follow instructions. It was relatively easy.
I’ve been using Thesis Theme for a day now. I love tweaking designs and Thesis has made it so much easier and quicker to tweak the design without having to hunt down the right code to edit in the CSS or HTML templates. Time is money so if a tool can save me time, then that’s good enough for me. I’m sure some people would expect a lot more for their money, but I consider it money well spent.
If you don’t intend to use Thesis on more than one blog and can live with the footer attribution link, then I suggest sticking with the Personal Option. You can always upgrade later on. And if you’re comfortable with CSS, then Thesis Theme probably won’t help you much.
I always had trouble changing from 2 column to 3 column and back again, and adding/removing tabbed navigation links in my old blog. Thesis Theme makes that a doddle.
Having said that, it’s not perfect though. For some unknown reason (or maybe I’m just blind - my wife keeps telling me I am - I tell her it’s a guy thing but she doesn’t believe me) Thesis Theme doesn’t have options to change the font colors, only the size and font typeface. So I had to search the files to find the right color variables to change which is time consuming. Thesis Theme does has a nice feature that lets you add custom CSS changes to a custom.css file so that the changes are not lost everytime you upgrade to the latest version.
I also noticed a couple of bugs but I am using the latest beta version so maybe these bugs will be ironed out by the time the official version is released.
Overall I would recommend Thesis Theme but only if you aren’t comfortable editing CSS code manually. It will save you a lot of time and headaches. It’s a bit expensive for what it offers, and as such I give Thesis Theme for WordPress a thumbs up and a score of 7/10. Thanks for the recommendation, Peter!
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