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More Production Video Theme Questions and Answers

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Yesterday I wrote my first post about the upcoming Production Genesis Child theme, which, to my knowledge, is the first video centric theme to hit the Genesis scene. Over the past few weeks I've been showing this to trusted developers, and eventually to the community via a sign up form. If you haven't signed up for your preview, please fill out this form.I've been … [Read more...]

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Coming Soon Production Video Theme

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If you follow me on twitter, you have probably seen me tweeting about the video theme I've been working on. I started putting out a few teaser images, then started asking folks to sign up for a preview on twitter. So far 30 of you have signed up for a preview, and feedback has been great. If you haven't' signed up already, take a minute to fill out this form for your sneak … [Read more...]

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How to Add a Widgeted Area (a.k.a. Sidebar)

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One question we get all the time is, "how do you add a new widgeted area to Genesis?" With a little bit of code this can be handled with relative ease.First, this tutorial requires novice to moderate php experience. You will be editing the functions.php file so make sure you have a backup of the file and a way to access your site via FTP, not just the theme editor in … [Read more...]

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Site Recovery Tips and Tricks

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Something bad is happening on your WordPress site. You try to login and have a white screen, or the entire site has been replaced with error messages. You're heart is starting to race. Sweat is beading in your face. How will you fix this?First, calm down. The solution is probably pretty simple. You need to be calm and focused to remember what changes may have led to … [Read more...]

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Theme Customization Basic Skills

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So, you have a nice new theme with tons of features, but you want to make changes so it will be uniquely yours. You are at a crossroad. Do you hire a developer or do you become a developer? There are risks and benefits for both. A skilled developer will know how to accomplish things you never thought possible, they will transform your site into what you want it to be, and … [Read more...]

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Format text widgets for valid urls

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Typically when you copy HTML from other sites with complex URIs in the src or href values, the text widgets won't validate. It is possible to manually update your html, but this can be very tedious, and if you aren't perfect, your code will break. I recently ran into this with a client and started to fix the code, then realized, what if the client ever changed the code? It … [Read more...]

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SOPA and PIPA are not good. I really hope that isn’t news to you. Today I am supporting efforts to bring these bills to an end and I want to encourage all my readers to do so as well. We are talking about some rather non-impressive numbers, but the power of compound interest demonstrates how small growth can effect big change. If I can convince even 10% of you to do something, and each of you effects a similar number of people who also reach …. it doesn’t take any time at all before we bring SOPA and PIPA to an end. A super simple thing everyone, even people who aren’t American citizens, can do is install the SOPA Blackout plugin on their site. It just sets up an onsite redirect and informs your visitors during the blackout dates (which you can configure) about the danger of SOPA and what they can do. Then provides a link back to what they were trying to view in the first place and leaves them be for the remainder of the browsing session. Worried about how that will look? Click through to my site on January 18th. You can also create your own custom page and configure a few other simple options. What are you waiting for? Go get the SOPA Blackout Plugin and put it on all your sites.

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Social Menu Icons Using Sprites

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Have you ever used yslow, or some other method of evaluating your site load speed? If you have you probably got a warning that using sprites will speed up your site by reducing server calls for individual images. If you are like me, the first time you saw that you were thinking about how you might go about trapping woodland faeries, and once you catch them, how do you … [Read more...]

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Custom Post Types Made Easy

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Post types aren't really that hard to start with. You start with some template code, then make a few changes and bam! Now you have a custom post type. However, teh code can get clunky if you register several CPTs. On this blog I have a single CPT, for the child themes used by my Child Theme Matrix. I use some template code I picked up when I first read about custom post … [Read more...]

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Show Related Posts with Thumbnails in Genesis

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I looked into a lot of related posts plugins for my personal blog, then remembered, I'm a theme developer, I bet I could write a very simple related posts script myself. The code I ended up using only takes 2 things into account, what tag is the post using and what category is it in. I try to take time to use tags that my posts can share to group them. For example, this … [Read more...]