In the previous version of Thesis, there were three panels of options: Thesis Options, Design Options, and Custom File Editor. Now the overarching title is simply Thesis, and it comes with five panels: Site Options, Design Options, Page Options, Custom File Editor, and Manage Options. (They've moved up in the WordPress dashboard as well, so they're right underneath the Comments section of the left-hand nav now.)

While I'm glad to see the Thesis Options panel disappear (because the overarching title used to be Thesis Options as well, making some instructions a bit weird, e.g. Go to Thesis Options > Thesis Options), I'm not sure I agree with Thesis creator Chris Pearson's description of the new organization as "leaner, faster, and more sensibly-arranged."

I don't know what Chris means by "leaner" and in my previous post on the new SEO options, I explained how slow the Page Options page becomes if you have a large number of tags. So that just leaves "sensibly arranged." I'm not wholly on board with that description either.

In the previous version, there was already some overlap between the Thesis Options and Design Options and they still exist between Site Options and Design Options. For example, you select which elements, such as date and author name, to display in post bylines on the Site Options page, whereas you select the same type of elements for teasers on the Design Options page.

In addition, there are a couple of changes that make less sense to me now than they used to:

• You set the title tag options for individual posts and pages on the Site Options screen. You set them for the home page, category, and tag pages on the Page Options screen.
• You choose whether to display feature posts in full or as excerpts on the Site Options screen, but you pick how many to display as featured on the Page Options screen.

The other thing that's a bit confusing is the actual names used for the different screens. Site Options... aren't all the options relevant to your site? And Page Options is spectacularly badly named, because a Page in WordPress has a specific connotation (i.e. static pages) and the Page Options have nothing to do with those Pages. However, I can give a bit of a pass on this, because I think using a generic term like "page" to mean something very specific was a mistake on WordPress's part to begin with...

Having said the above, I don't think it really matters all that much. I strongly recommend that as soon as you install Thesis you immediately go into each screen and see exactly what options there are and where. (Note that you can click the big plus sign beside the screen heading to expand all the individual panels at once.) You'll get used to the organization soon enough.

So overall I don't think there's much in the reorganized interface to get excited about one way or the other. However, I do want to point out one specific new feature in the Design Options screen. You can now choose which fields you want to appear in the Comments section and forms and also drag them into a different order. I've seen a lot of people ask for this in the DIYthemes forums, so it's a great addition.

Options Manager

This new screen is one of the best new features of version 1.7 for anybody who is building multiple Thesis sites and doesn't necessarily want to start from scratch. Previously, you could save your custom.css and custom_functions.php files and upload them to the new site, but you needed to manually copy the Options settings (or use a third-party plugin). Now you can simply download the options settings (for each individual screen or for all of them together) for site A into a .DAT file and then upload that file into site B to give it the same options.

I'd give this feature a resounding thumbs up except there's one issue with its implementation that I think will cause a lot of people problems. (I'm not calling it a bug because apparently it's expected to work this way...) The issue is if you've got pages set in the nav menu for Site A and you upload the Page Options (or All Options) into site B, those page names will show up in your nav bar, even though the actual pages don't exist.

A reader alerted me to this issue and she was able to remove the "ghost pages" by deleting their names and unchecking them in Site B. However, I had a bigger problem in my test—the pages didn't show up in the nav menu listing under Site Options, even though they did appear in the actual menu bar at the top of my site. So there was no way for me to remove them except to restore the default Page Options (which is a nice feature on its own). But then that would wipe out any other customizations you would want to import from Site A to Site B. I haven't figured out a better solution yet—if I find one, I'll definitely post it. (And if you find one, please let me know! :)

Posted in My Two Cents,Thesis