Genesis 1.8 introduced a whole new admin system. As I was writing the previous articles in the Admin section of the Genesis Explained series I saw that this system was being updated, so I decided to wait on any further articles until Genesis 1.8 came out and settled in. The new admin system is OOP based, which means is makes use of PHP classes … [Read more...]
How to Add a Widgeted Area (a.k.a. Sidebar)
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 … [Read more...]
Site Recovery Tips and Tricks
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 … [Read more...]
Theme Customization Basic Skills
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 … [Read more...]
Format text widgets for valid urls
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 … [Read more...]
Social Menu Icons Using Sprites
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 … [Read more...]
Custom Post Types Made Easy
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 … [Read more...]
Show Related Posts with Thumbnails in Genesis
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 … [Read more...]
Control Post Order With Genesis Featured Widget Amplified plugin
I have a confession, a lot of the features in my Genesis Featured Widget Amplified plugin are purely selfish. I needed hooks in the Genesis Featured Post widget for a client or else I was going to need a custom widget just for this one project. So I built the plugin. I wanted a drop down list for the extra posts in another client site, so the … [Read more...]
Skip Terms
Back when I first started my personal blog, I was using a theme with a custom home page and no blog page template. This posed a problem as I didn't have a good archive for all of my posts, so I setup a default category "All" that every post was added to. This worked pretty good for that theme, but presented problems for me in … [Read more...]