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Thesis Recipes

Thesis Image Frame Issues?

Edit: With the release of Thesis 1.6, Chris has fixed the framing issue discussed below. If you’re still running 1.5, this post is still relevant. If not, not.

Today I stumbled across an annoying bug in Thesis 1.5.1 that stops image frames from displaying even when the Thesis options panel and individual WordPress post settings are set to display frames.

So, armed with my trusty DIYTHEMES FORUM username and password, I set out either to fix the problem or find a hack. It seems this is a problem a few Thesis users have been having under WordPress 2.8, and a simple hack is in place to make all your images look pretty again.

First off, not everyone will experience this (only us special people). It’s an intermittant problem. Second, the bug is likely to be stamped on in an upcoming release of v1.5.2. Until then, we can use CSS to work around the problem.

Here’s how to add the default gray frame around your images using CSS:

  1. Open your custom.css file (wp-content/themes/thesis_151/custom/custom.css) in your favourite text editor, or if you’re using Thesis Openhook (which you should be; it’s great), go to Appearance > Thesis Custom Styling in the WordPress backend.
  2. Find a space near the bottom and add the following CSS:

.custom .headline_area .post_image {
padding: 1em;
border-width: 0.1em;
background:#EEEEEE none repeat scroll 0 0;
border-color:#DDDDDD;
border-style:solid;
}

.custom .format_text .post_image {
padding: 0.714em;
border-width: 0.071em;
background:#EEEEEE none repeat scroll 0 0;
border-color:#DDDDDD;
border-style:solid;
}

.custom .teaser .post_image_link .thumb {
padding: 0.8em;
border-width: 0.1em;
background:#EEEEEE none repeat scroll 0 0;
border-color:#DDDDDD;
border-style:solid;
}

.custom .format_teaser .post_image_link .thumb {
padding: 0.333em;
border-width: 0.083em;
background:#EEEEEE none repeat scroll 0 0;
border-color:#DDDDDD;
border-style:solid;
}

Save your file using the ‘little ass save button’ in Openhook, or upload your custom.css file using an FTP client. This should fix your problem.

Bing!

You may think that Bing, Microsoft’s new search engine, is a complete waste of time given Google’s 90%+ market share. But Bing is different. Unlike Google or Yahoo, it aggregates content. Ian Lurie, who writes about SEO/online marketing at Conversation Marketing, puts it this way:

Microsoft’s Bing is the latest example of search engines as aggregators, rather than indexes. Go to Bing.com, search for ‘LA Lakers’, and you get a list of results. Roll over a search result, though, and you get a detailed look at the content on the listed site.

What this means is that you’re giving the person searching for results yet another reason NOT to click through to your blog/website. Why? Well now they can read the meta description the search engine serves up for your site AND an excerpt of the first 300+ characters of content on your page.

For a blog that displays latest posts on the home page, this may not be ideal (because people may not hire you based on your latest ‘I hate clients’ blog post).

This is the problem I’ve been having with Bing (displaying the wrong content, not hating my clients), so I decided to tweak my WordPress theme, Thesis.

Here’s what I want to have displayed at the top of my home page for prospective clients, blog readers and search engines to see:

introbox

Pretty simple, right? Yes, very. Thesis uses hooks to inject code into the theme, so you have to write a custom function to make anything happen. Here’s a walkthrough to help you out: [click to continue…]