I would suggest reading these two tutorials. the first goes over the basics of the loop. (the core code that makes Wordpress display posts). The second one goes into detail on how to create custom loops, which is what we use in this tutorial.

http://www.themelab.com/2008/04/04/the-ultimate-guide-to-the-wordpress-loop/
http://weblogtoolscollection.com/archives/2008/04/13/define-your-own-wordpress-loop-using-wp_query/

Hope this will make things a little more clear, if it isn’t i’ll try and make a tutorial explaining the loop.

Thanks for taking the time to write this out. I think I’m missing some basic information because I’m just not getting it. I looked up WP_Query() but again, it’s just over my head (I do know some basic PHP just not WordPress structure). Do you know of any basic (from the ground up) tutorial that goes through this with a simple, step-by-step example? Or perhaps you’d care to make one?

I think you’re gonna make some great tuts man! you’ve ‘got it’. Stick with it.

Essentially where we define a custom query starting with the line “my_custom_query” we ask wordpress to give us the most recent post. This takes the place of the post id.

The while statement will walk through this post (and more if you queried more) and do whatever is between the begin “while” and the “endwhile.”

In this example we are looking to get the custom wordpress field “thesis_post_image” which is where thesis stores the information on the post image you upload. $key is the name of the custom field you are using.

What we do then is use the wordpress query “get_post_custom_values” for the key. This will return as an array. Of this array we want the first entry and we asign it to $featuredimage. We then echo out the featured image.

Hope this makes it a bit clearer, that video was recorded VERY quickly with no rehersal or plan, I wanted to get it out and was pushed for time.

Let me know if you have more questions.

I think Thesis is a nice WP theme but it’s way to closed off and proprietary to be considered a framework.