February 2011 – Getting the Most Out of the Genesis Theme Framework, Part 2

Yesterday’s fabulous meetup on the subject of Genesis brought out some interesting people and questions. Here are my slides showing off the various neat features that I use to build sites with the Framework

As of June 2017, I can’t find Anca’s original slides for this post, but I have included my notes. –Sallie

Features: SEO

The keywords meta field can be helpful for internal search on your site.

Layout and Page Classes

That custom Body Class or Custom Post Class is something I do want but had not noticed much. It’s under the layout options for pages and posts. Anca says it will show up on custom content types on the individual item edit page.

These mean you don’t have to write PHP code for appearance changes for pages (color, layout), just CSS.

Simple Sidebars Plugin

Lets you define new widgetized areas. (Nice, but one might still want to use it in combination with something like Display Widgets or the plugin Stefan used.)

Ah. When you use the plugin, you get a metabox with a dropdown for what shows up in your primary and  secondary sidebars.

Genesis Widgets:

Featured Page lets you place the contents of a page into a widget. Lots of the Genesis child themes use these.

Featured Posts is extremely customizable: catgories, gravatar, featured image, post title, info, number of poosts, archive link, etc. And you can offset it, if you had a section with a latest post in big box—that will avoid repetition.

Easy Edit

Uses shortcodes to edit post meta data.

Simple Hooks

Lets you add text or code to certain areas of the page. Hooks ask “Does anybody else want to do something here?”

You could put a page wrapper around your page in the genesis_before_header hook.

If you switch to a different Genesis child theme, anything in Simple Hooks will still be there. (It won’t if you put it into functions.php)

Prose Child Theme

It writes a CSS for you—a feature known from Thesis. A drawback to doing this in, for instance, Atahualpa, is moving the site, but they have an export button for the CSS. It creates a secondary market for CSS skins for Prose. Clever and interesting. Anca  finds it faster to type the CSS, but if you don’t know CSS, this does work. Prose handles all measurement in pixels.

Copying widgets

Look in functions/widgets in the theme you want. Copy the widget code to the functions.php file of the theme you’re going to use. The built-in Genesis widgets are not plugins, so anything in them would disappear if you change to a non-Genesis theme.

When you change themes, your regular widgets go into the inactive widgets bucket. It would be nice to have an “export my widget settings” button.