Using the Genesis Framework

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

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