The Thesis theme is a great option for anyone using WordPress who doesn’t want to get involved with coding, but sometimes, if you want Thesis to provide a little more function than the out of the box version, I am afraid you will have to get your hands a little dirty.
I use Thesis here. I have customised it a bit, but I think if you are familiar with the default version of Thesis it is still quite recognisable (and there is a hint in the footer).
As part of the development process I wanted to make more use of the footer area by adding widgets. There isn’t an option to do this from the Thesis admin area, but it is possible by modifying custom_functions.php and custom.css (these are files that sit outside the core files so future updates of Thesis will not overwrite customizations).
A quick search on the Thesis forum provided a link to a tutorial on how to set up extra sidebars in Thesis and in a matter of minutes I had enabled the extra sidebars/widgets I wanted. I haven’t used them yet, but the function exists and they are working correctly.
The tutorial is very easy to follow and the code works to perfection, but be sure to read the article in full.
This is how to do it
Get Thesis
