Some time ago I wrote an article on making content conditional. In this I explained the basic of adding code via actions, either manually or through the Genesis Simple Hooks plugin, that will only appear in specific parts of the site. If you are looking for the basics on getting something to only show on your home page, category archives, single … [Read more...]
Creating Page Templates in Genesis
A question I field on a regular basis is "how do I make a page template in Genesis?" It's actually very easy to do, and I have a template I want to share for my Production theme. Two users in a day asked how to combine videos and posts into a single blog view. Merging post types is pretty simple, you just need a custom loop. However, for people … [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...]
Add Twitter Button to Menu
Got another Quick Tip for you. Did you notice the Twitter Button in my menu? I have a few custom buttons up by my logo, but the twitter button is special. It using the twitter API instead of just linking you to my Twitter profile. The code for this is in a couple parts. The first part is a html file that handles everything. It is loaded in … [Read more...]
Changing Archive Sorting
Got another quick tip for you. FYI, these quick tips are things I use on my personal sites. Simple and handy tricks. With my Genesis Explained series, and all the sub-series sections, I wanted to change the order of the posts in the archives because it is helpful to read them in the order they were written. First, I chose to use tags instead … [Read more...]