The next version of Thesis – Thesis 1.7 coming soon

I received an email from the folks at DIYThemes today about the next version of Thesis, Thesis 1.7.  Thesis 1.7 will be released over the next few weeks.  Developers will get early betas then everyone else once the release is stable.  Here’s the scoop on the new features:

• Options Manager – This is something I’ve been looking forward to for a while.  The options manager will let you save and load all of the Thesis Options settings.  This is huge for Thesis developers like myself as whenever I installed a new site I always had to manually set the set up.  This usually involved me working from a screen shot or from notes where I wrote down the settings.  No more.  With the options manager, you can now save the settings and load them to another site.  Whoo-hoo!
• New SEO Controls and Details – Thesis 1.7 will include a number of new SEO features.  I mean, Thesis rocks SEO now, but with Thesis 1.7 we’ll get to really tweak settings at a very detailed level.  Thesis 1.7 will allow you to set title tags, meta tags, indexing on each page of your site.  The DIYThemes folks have even added a new page to Thesis Options that let you control SEO settings for category and tag pages as well.
• Headline Feature – I haven’t totally grasped the implications of this one yet, but Thesis 1.7 adds a new headline filter.  This filter will allow you to show and hide headlines.  As an example, Chris is using it on Pearsonified which is running a pre-release version of 1.7.  Here’s the specific example page: http://www.pearsonified.com/2010/01/web-publishing-2010.php.
• Enhanced Internationalization – Thesis supported internationalization before, but had a few holes.  With 1.7 it’s fully internationalized and can now be fully translated.

I’m sure there will be more and these are just the big features, but it looks to be a another great release, especially with the options manager.  The email also had a teaser about helping us build better content too.  This won’t be directly Thesis related, but is coming from Chris’ partner Brian Clark who writes on Copyblogger.net.  Once I hear more, I’ll let you know.  It sounds very interesting.