When browsing other WordPress blogs with awesome themes, I always find myself wondering how someone handled a particular aspect of the layout or functionality. This is especially true with the Thesis Theme, because of the difference in setup due to the Thesis hooks system. So for anyone browsing Kikolani, I wanted to answer the question of “how did you do that” in a new series on WordPress Thesis Theme Customization.

Part Two: Plugins

One of the things I love about WordPress is that most of the functionality that you are seeking can be found in the plug-ins directory. Most of them (with exception to cForms II) can be found in the WordPress plug-ins directory and installed automatically in WordPress 2.7+ by going into your Admin Panel > Plugins > Add New >. Other plug-ins can be uploaded in .zip format on the Add New Plugins page. Here are the ones that I use – with exception to Thesis OpenHook, these are great suggestions for other themes as well.

• Add Post Footer – This plugin allows you to add specific content to every post, text and ads. This is where I add in the 468×60 Google Adsense ad along with the “Enjoy this post?…” text at the end of each post. (This plugin isn’t fully necessary, considering I could add it into the custom-functions.php, but I haven’t gotten around to moving it yet. Plus it’s a great plugin for other themes.)

• cForms II – This plugin controls the form on my contact page. It is highly flexible in terms of adding additional fields (checkboxes, drop downs, additional text inputs, etc.) and customizing the styling of the forms, offering several pre-built styles to choose from with the option to further edit the CSS for those styles.

• Chat Catcher – This plugin captures some of the Twitter and FriendFeed shares of a particular post and adds them to your post’s comments as comments or trackbacks. I have mine set to “Post Trackbacks.”

• CommentLuv – This plugin automatically captures the latest blog post of a comment author, provided that they have registered their site on ComLuv.

When browsing other WordPress blogs with awesome themes, I always find myself wondering how someone handled a particular aspect of the layout or functionality. This is especially true with the Thesis Theme, because of the difference in setup due to the Thesis hooks system. So for anyone browsing Kikolani, I wanted to answer the question of “how did you do that” in a new series on WordPress Thesis Theme Customization.

Part One: Options

The Thesis Theme comes with two sets of options: Thesis Options and Design Options.

Thesis Options

Thesis Options control the main functionality of the Thesis Theme, including SEO, syndication/RSS, thumbnails and more. Here are the options I have set for Kikolani.