Improved blog look after upgrade to Thesis 1.4

Thesis released an upgrade today. Cool thing about Thesis Theme is that you get a lifetime subscription to the theme upgrades along with the purchase. So when I heard about the new version release, I was very quick to download it and have already upgraded my blog to Thesis 1.4.

Thesis is very easy to upgrade. As all the customization you do on the theme is located in two files (custom_functions.php and custom.css). To upgrade you just upload the new version folder to your hosting account and move your two already customized files from your old version into the new folder.

So what has changed on my blog because of Thesis 1.4?

• New format of my front page and my category pages. The most recent article is now the featured article and the rest of articles are shown as short teasers only. Teasers are listed in two columns which saves a lot of space. There are now 21 articles on my front page and the page is still shorter than it was with my traditional 10 article blog front page. So my main page is now shorter and easier to load, and gives exposure to more articles.

• Thesis 1.4 completely removes the need of meta tags / title tags plugins. Now my blog title is fixed and it shows at the end of each of my article titles without a plugin. And when I want to write a post Thesis features the post meta tags options below the post like the All In One SEO plugin does.

• Moving to Thesis WordPress Theme was a huge breakthrough for me in regards to styling of my articles, fonts, headlines, notes and images. My articles got a whole new modern and professional look after styling them with Thesis. Now Thesis 1.4 makes the process of styling articles with images even easier. When you write an article and want to insert an image, Thesis features image formatting like ALT text, frames, position within the post and wrapping of the text just below the text field.

These 3 are the 3 coolest new features I have discovered while playing with Thesis 1.4 today. I am sure I will discover some other cool possibilities in the upcoming days and will customize my blog even further. The $87 I spent on buying Thesis last month is worth it and gets more valuable after each free upgrade.