I have been using Brian Gardner themes for a few years now, even before StudioPress existed. Brian puts a lot of effort into getting it right. Although WordPress has many Themes to offer, I stuck with Brian because of the extra effort he built into his works of art. Even his free themes never broke, had an excellent logic to them, were (are) easy to follow so they could be customized and even had SEO (search engine optimization) built into the back end. SEO is important because no matter how great your website is, if no one can find it …

So now I am trying the Genesis Framework. I’m not going to explain what a framework is, you can read about that on StudioPress.com or on WordPress.org.

I see that the Genesis Framework remains the same quality and standard of excellence as hoped. I read many reviews about this framework and they were all positive as far as I could see. The logic makes it easy to customize and it is amazingly fast, something I had not expected. SEO is built in and a huge plus is that the forums answer any question you might have. I was delighted to see a long support thread which really had little to do with Genesis or a child-theme, yet the people at StudioPress had taken an enormous amount of time and energy to fix the RSS feed problem. Above and beyond what should be expected from a support forum.

Observations About The Genesis Framework

Some of my observations:

Genesis as a framework is up-to-date with all the goodies WordPress has built into the back end. It is easy to add “Hooks” and “Filters” and “Shortcodes”. Of course there is a learning curve to all of these – the difference between hooks and filters for example. But that is the reality of using any technology. One tip I would give you is that if you are searching the forums for answers, make sure you are viewing an answer to do with the latest Genesis release. As upgrades are released, some older issues have been re-deployed in the newer versions. But I’m rambling here… It took me a couple of days to get my live sites set up (this is a testing site). Some simple items such as page navigation is made overly complicated since I was trying to resolve all my needs without editing any of the Genesis code. Adding all the bits and pieces to the child theme was possible, but it took some extra time. (Part of the problem is learning the terminology so as to find the correct answers in the support forums or the Genesis documentation.)

Genesis Child Themesy

The Child-themes are nice and simple. They all have the style.css file, functions.php and home.php and some have landing pages or other custom pages. That makes initial setup and quick changes relatively simple. Not all the child themes look modern, but behind the scenes they too have been updated. (If you remember back to the Revolution days, you will find those themes are on the StudioPress site.)

Since I am terrible at graphics and color coordination, I rely heavily on graphic artists tastes and ideas to put together a nice looking theme. A small wish I have is that a couple more “modern” themes would be added. For example, if the last StudioPress theme had been added to the portfolio I would have taken it. I read somewhere that Brian argues too many choices don’t help. He is probably right about that but perhaps retiring some of the older-looking Revolution themes would be an idea (hiding them somewhere where people could still find them).

Conclusions

Genesis is:

• Fast
• Up-to-date (HTML5 and Responsive Design and Flexible Grid are all coming – probably done by the time you read this )

UPDATE: there are already a couple of Responsive Design themes available!!

• Customization-able
• SEO friendly
• Well supported (even the old themes I don’t use anymore are still supported!)
• Costs some money, but not much by comparison
• Reliable / trustworthy
• Has several plugins created just for Genesis
• PSD files included for custom headers

An example of some of the many Shortcodes: (within a blockquote)

Wednesday, January 18, 2012 5:55 · Nitrous Theme on the Genesis Framework by StudioPress powered by WordPress

• Akismet (by Automattic): Comes bundled with WordPress, Akismet “blocks 99.9% of spam” from reaching your blog. (Ok, it does a decent job, but let’s not exaggerate Akismet, ok?)
• Broken Links Checker (by Janis Elsts): I only activate this occasionally to check for broken links, but it works well.
• Dagon Design Form Mailer (by Dagon): There are many Contact forms available, for some reason I stuck with Dagon’s.
• Dagon Design Sitemap Generator (by Dagon): This sitemap is internal and displays the way I want it. (I’ll actually be using a BuddyPress plugin for this sites Sitemap) …
• fbLikeButton (by Dean Peters): Another “Like Button” which allows Facebook users to like an article, share it and so forth, effective!
• Google XML Sitemaps (by Arne Brachhold): This plugin generates an XML sitemap to help Google, Yahoo, Bing and Ask.com to better index the site.
• Greg’s Comment Length Limiter (by Greg Mulhauser): Long comments are unreadable and unhelpful, but I can limit them using this plugin.
• HeadSpace2 (by John Godley) / or All in One SEO Pack (by Michael Torbert): SEO plugins so you can add keywords, etc. Not needed for many new Themes, but still helpful.
• (Move Comments) [Deactivated until it's needed. This by Apostolos Dountsis works well]: Sometimes I move posts and want to move the comments too…
• Page Menu Editor (also built into All in One SEO plugin) (by Sarah Anderson). Many themes offer a top bar navigation where the Title is the same as the link (such as Home, Members, etc). To change the title tag use this plugin or the AIOSEO (assuming you don’t want to edit your theme header.php file).
• Page Links To (by Mark Jaquith): I moved some posts and pages and found this plugin helped clean up the links.
• RefTagger (Transform Bible references into links by Logos Bible Software): RefTagger supports all of the Bible book names and their standard abbreviations.
• Related Posts by Category (by Sergej Muller): I used to rely on categories to cross-reference posts, not so important now-a-days.
• Subscribe to Comments (by Mark Jaquith): Just a nice touch for those who post comments and want to see who responds.
• What Would Seth Godin Do (by Richard K Miller): Offers new and returning visitors different greetings, a friendly plugin.
• Widget Logic (by Alan Trewartha): Brilliant, lets me put different Sidebar content (widgets) on different posts, pages, home, whatever I need and want!!
• WordPress Security – see note below.
• WP-DBManager (by Leters Chan): A must have, to optimize, backup and otherwise manage the database from within the WP-Dashboard.

Plus a few others which are site-related

WordPress Security Plugins

There are quite a few plugins to help your WordPress site and there are several things you can do manually to improve security. Most of the manual steps are outlined quite clearly on the WordPress.org site and perhaps I’ll create a post with some links to other sites talking about this. However, there are a few things to remember:

1) Some security issues rest with your hosting company. Some issues I had in the past were taken care of when I checked with my host.

2) Some vulnerabilities are based on the version of WordPress, Themes, Plugins and so on you are using. The general rule is to update and stay up-to-date. When you login to your Dashboard, you will get a list of updates available.

3) Based on both these above points, you probably need to be careful taking advise or adding plugins which were written for older version of WordPress or specific themes. As I said above, I could add links to sites which have helped me in the past when security issues came up. However, some of the issues they mention have already been fixed in the latest version of WordPress.

Having said that, here are a couple of helpful plugins I use on certain sites:

• Secure WordPress (by jremillard): Gives the option to remove versions and protect against malicious requests (Malware).
• WordPress File Monitor (by Matt Walters): handy plugin which checks for added, changed or deleted files.
• WordPress Ultimate Security Check (by Eugene Pyvovarov): this free version does a check and tells you possible problems.
• WP Security Scan (by Michael Torbert): A set of Admin tools with quite a bit of info about your site including tools to fix many problems.

The whole structure of the WordPress has been designed to be flexible. And since I don’t have time to get into PHP nor even MySQL Database, I am very thankful to have a community where there are enough experts who are willing to offer advise, insight and point me in the right direction to find answers I need. Best of all, when January 1st comes around, I don’t have to worry if I changed all of my 200x to 200x since my pages and posts are automatically dated.

Yes, I would say WordPress is a system for me, a system which is getting better and better with each new release (and there have been many new releases, also a nice touch). For sure I will not be going back to HTML. As with any system, it isn’t perfect and I would love to see a few things added which I like (including the looks of the “themes” which tend to get pretty boring) but I see potential since it is a system which is trying to grow along with the Internet community it serves.

For example, some of the areas it is growing into is:

More CMS functionality (Content Management – in other words, like a traditional website not based on dates for your posts, but more for content as you want the public to see it and find it.)

More SEO friendly (Search Engine Optimization – always changing, but simply how to help search engines find you, and thus, eventually, have people find your site.)
[SEO is a huge topic, more on this later ...]

More users (WordPress has a strong following, and it is getting much stronger. In a year or so it is predicted WordPress will have 50% of the blog market.)

More later (there is a lot to be said about WordPress, so I’ll keep coming back to this.)

Bye for now … xodigoguy

What that means is, if you “subscribed” before, you will have to re-subscribe.

Not sure what went wrong, I suspect something with this new theme (the new look) wasn’t quite right …

It would also be helpful to know if you find this new theme or look helpful — meaning, is it readable, easy to use, enough information, too much, etc etc. Leave a comment and let me know.

Thanks, Admin