A Free Alternative to the Thesis Theme

The Thesis Theme developed by Chris Pearson and marketed by Brian Clark has become the most popular and de facto theme for people who want a highly customizable and user friendly WordPress premium theme. While Thesis is a great theme, it costs 87$ for a single user version and $164 for a developer version.

If you are not yet ready to spend that much of money on a WordPress theme, you can consider the Vigilance theme (by Jestro) which provides a very rich set of features and it is free! Vigilance comes in two flavors. A free version and a paid version. The paid version which is called as the Pro version is a child theme that will coexist along with the free version. The child theme provides some extra add-ons. So in essence the free theme is almost identical to the Pro version.

My blog is currently running on the Vigilance Pro theme (version 1.34 as of Sep 2009). The Vigilance theme has been continuously developed and improved over the last 1 year. It is a very mature theme that has been tested by a large community of users.

The Vigilance theme has a control panel where you can modify many settings without doing any coding. While the control panel provides a rich set of customization features you might still want to further customize your theme by changing the code.

If you are technical enough you can customize the Vigilance theme by yourself. But if you need help in customizing the theme you can join the support forum at Jestro. By customizing the theme you make your blog unique. The membership to the support forum is priced at 44$ for life and it is definitely worth the price because you get help on customizing all other themes that are released by Jestro. I am a member in the support forum and I am very happy with the level of support provided by Jestro.

For a complete list of Vigilance features visit the Vigilance Theme page.