On Thanksgiving day, while waiting for the turkey to finish cooking I did some searching on the web. I was looking for a solution to make better use of the the categories in the wordpress Thesis theme.

While most people using Thesis will no doubt simply check the box that to not have the page indexed by the robots it kind of deletes the purpose of having those pages anyway.

During that search I ran across an article written by Rae Hoffman at Sugarrae.com. She has done a fantastic job in explaining what needs to be done in-order to make better use of the category pages.

This is something that I’ve already done in one of my drupal sites and was much easer to do than it was in wordpress.

Ok so what am I talking about here making the categories more robust and giving both the search engines and site visitors just a page with that starts off with:

FROM THE CATEGORY ARCHIVES:

By using hooks we can add relevant text to the top of the archives pages making them both search engine and visitor friendly.

In looking at the code and some of the example sites I did see one thing which I also found as a challenge in Drupal. That challenge is in the pagination of Drupal As well as WordPress.

Here is the code that Rae provided and I’d recommend you read her entire page “Thesis Tutorial – Creating Custom Categories”

In the code there is the statement:

if(is_category('apples')) {

Which does exactly what it is supposed to, but when pagination occurs we end up with the same message at the top of the category page again.

To the search engines it appears as duplicate content and might and I do say might appear to our visitors that they are still on the same page.

What I did was to add just a few items to the code:

if (is_category(‘apples’) && !is_home() && !is_paged()) {

This now gives us the text we want on the main category page and subsequent pages will display 2, 3, 4, etc…

FROM THE CATEGORY ARCHIVES:

Still not perfect but at least it gets us off to a great start. For the technically savvy web surfer it is not a problem, but it is for the majority of web surfers.

This past Saturday, I finally decided to get to work with the WordPress Thesis theme. I wanted to create a static front page and also have a blog section. The challenge arose with you guessed it duplicate titles and duplicate description fields.

Although I should be fair I do believe it had more to do with using the All-In-One-SEO wordpress plugin then anything to do with either Thesis or WordPress. It took me almost 6 hours to get it setup, seems like no matter what I tried it just would not work.

Essentially the theme does not really need any SEO plugins to be effective anymore. Yet, I’m kind of hesitant to give up the SEO control to a template. I really did like the All-In-One-SEO plugin, yet all I really used it for was the auto-description function, call most of us lazy!

After hours of research, trying just about everything I finally logged into the database and completely removed Headspace2 and any reference to All-In-One-SEO. After this was done things finally began to progress.

The bad part is I ended up modifying the core Thesis theme header.php file, which also means that I’ll need to keep that in mind should any update come along. The most useful information I found for this process came from Luke Harrison’s page titled “Giving your Static Homepage and Blog page different TITLES in WordPress” this got me going in the right direction.

Yet I did deviate quite a bit from his example, click for a larger view.

Once this was done it was a matter of getting the front page title and the blog title along with the correct description set on the respective pages, as I said I played with this for hours with no progress when the All-In-One-SEO plugin was installed.

In the Thesis forum there was no shortage of advice on how to setup a static front page, with titles and descriptions, which of course did not work. Now this maybe a problem since the version is rc5.

What I finally ended up with that was a working solution is, under Thesis Options >> Document Head >> Title tag everything is unchecked! Under Home Page >> Home Page Meta, there is nothing in the meta description or meta keywords. This is contradictory to everything they said to do.

On the front page using the Thesis SEO Details and Additional Style I entered the meta description here. The title is entered in WordPress >> Settings >> General under Blog Title Home Business Opportunities News & Ideas.

Ok for the blog page, I gave the page a title in WordPress Nav60′s Home Business Blog at this point I now had the title for the front page and blog set along with the description set for the front page.

In order to set the description for the blog page it was back to the WordPress >> Settings >> General under Tagline. Setting this up was a royal pain, as none of it makes any sense. Believe me I tried every possible combination to accomplish this!

My gut feeling is with a clean install of WordPress, then bringing in the Thesis template things are probably different. Yet, how many of us will take an existing site and destroy all of our content?

As I mentioned before one of my concerns was losing the auto-description feature from the All-In-One-SEO Plugin, since I like and use Marsedit to post to multiple blogs both Drupal and WordPress.

Reading through the Thesis forum, there where references that the theme would even take the excerpt field for a post description. So I gave it a try with Marsedit and sure enough it does work!

So now it makes my favorite blog editor that much more enjoyable to use. Of course I’m fully expecting that I may have to do this all over again with the final version of Thesis is released.

Yet if this helps just a few people who are concerned with duplicate titles and descriptions in WordPress then it is worth it. Do let me know if it helps you.

Just A Follow Up… After several months playing with wordpress and thesis I came to the decision that in order to achieve the desired SEO actions I was after to move the site mentioned above to Drupal 6.x.

Eventually I may post about why this move was made and the benefits from it.

This past week I’ve been playing with and setting up the WordPress theme Thesis by Chris Pearson. I had read just about everywhere about the theme and how good it was SEO wise, so I thought I would check it out since I have a few blogs that use WordPress vs Drupal.

Not being able to look under the hood without actually buying the theme made it difficult to see what it was all about. Most of the sites that I had visited, well lets just say there where many mistakes being made that would be so easy to clean up if they only took a little time to do it.

Then again maybe they just don’t know about it. Today there are so many experts out there talking about setting up wordpress, of course will to charge the unsuspecting for it. Many web hosts have it setup to install it fairly quick and easy.

So what did I find different about the Thesis theme? Previously on my wordpress sites I had used the revolution themes, which where pretty easy to customize. If you know a little about php, you can do some pretty neat things.

I ended up installing the 1.5b Thesis theme “note the b it’s a beta version” there is at this time 1.4.2. Just about everywhere I looked everyone had pretty much left the theme almost just like it came. Yet that’s not my style, I like digging under the hood so to speak. One of the things I did not like about Thesis, yet is really is a minor issue if you know how to clean it up is the multiple CSS files.

The Bloat

Some of the sites that I had looked at no less then 15 external Javascript files and 11 external CSS files. I think this is where drupal really shines, it’s the ability to aggregate and compress the CSS files into just one. The Java files are aggregated but not compressed. The lack of aggregation and compression is a WordPress issue, not a Thesis theme issue.

I was very impressed with the support forum at diythemes.com, lots of people in there asking questions to issues they where facing which ranged from CSS issues to more complicated issues. Having a good support forum is essential for any piece of software, often you’ll find a few golden nuggets that lets you take it further then maybe even the designer imagined.

One of the things I’ve always liked is tabbed navigation with drop down menus. With a little CSS styling and a graphic I quickly set it up, now if I only knew how to use my Photoshop CS3 better I could create a decent header graphic for the site. You can see what I did in an afternoon here at Nav60.com with the site and drop down menus.

Thesis Options

This was one area that was a nice addition to any wordpress theme, simply select the options you want or do not want.

Display Options

• Title Tag
• Document Head
• Archives
• Tagging
• Comments
• Sidebars
• Administration

Customize Your Thesis Design

• Custom Stylesheet

Syndication/Feed

Navigation Menu

Multimedia Box

Stats Software and Scripts

Thesis Design Options

Fonts and Font sizes

• Body and Content Area
• Content Area
• Nav Menu
• Header
• Headlines
• Bylines and Post Meta Data
• Code
• Multimedia Box
• Sidebars
• Footer

Layout: Columns and Widths

Home Page Layout and Content

Feature Box

Post Images and Thumbnails

Framework Options

As you can see from the list about, the Thesis theme gives you a lot of options to play around with, allowing you to really customize the theme to you. With just two pages to click on for options it is much simpler then Drupal, yet as far as I can tell at this point is not quite as easy to manipulate as Drupal. If you’re looking for a great theme then you could not go wrong with Thesis for WordPress.