Cre8tive Burst was developed by Shannon Dow of EightCrazy Designs, and can be found in the StudioPress Marketplace. As a reminder, these are quality themes from our community and not included in the Pro Plus All-Themes package, but we assure you that the design and coding of them are top-notch.

Theme Features

The Cre8tive Burst child theme includes the following features: 4 color styles, 3 layout options, custom background, custom menus, featured images, fixed width, theme options, threaded comments.

Take it for a test drive…

Screenshot of the Cre8tive Burst Theme

Mobile Responsive Design

The eleven40 theme is the second child theme released here at StudioPress which has been developed to be mobile responsive in design. It’s also the first theme we’ve developed that extends 1140px wide vs. our current themes which are 960px.

Click here to see how the eleven40 theme looks across mobile devices.

Theme Features

The eleven40 theme includes the following features: 6 layout options, 4 theme colors (blue, green, orange, red), custom background, featured images, footer widgets, mobile responsive design and threaded comments.

Take it for a test drive…

Screenshot of the eleven40 Theme

Front End Redesign

Genesis 1.8 ships with a hot new default style on the front end. And while we know that you would never activate Genesis directly, this new style can, and no doubt will serve as the basis of many of the beautiful creations our users continue to push out.

This modern new look takes a step into the realm of responsive design, adjusting to fit whatever device on which you happen to be viewing the site, including smart phones and tablet computers.

New SEO Controls

One of the biggest weaknesses of the Genesis SEO controls was the fact that you couldn’t actually control the text displayed on category, tag, and term archive pages. All you could do was decide whether or not you wanted the term title and description to display.

With Genesis 1.8, this all changes. You now have the ability to control EXACTLY what gets displayed on your term archive pages.

New Extendable Classes for Creating Admin Menus

Considering how many Genesis-specific plugins there are out there, we imagine that more than a few developers are frustrated at how difficult it was to add new Genesis admin menus. In Genesis 1.8, it gets about 100x easier. How much easier? See for yourself.

Completely Disable a Navigation Menu, from functions.php

If you’ve ever build a Genesis Child Theme for a client, and knew you’d have no use for the Primary or Secondary Navigation menu, you know how hard it can be to keep your client from messing with the Theme Settings and potentially ruining your beautiful design.

So, with one line of code, you can now disable either menu. It works using the “theme support” method. By default, both menus are enabled. But, you can use this line of code to change which menus are supported via your child theme.

remove_theme_support( 'genesis-menus' );

This line will remove both menus. But let’s say you just want to remove the secondary nav menu, and leave the primary menu intact. Easy.

add_theme_support( 'genesis-menus', array( 'primary' => 'Primary Navigation Menu' ) );

This line indicates that you ONLY want the primary nav menu to be enabled.

Color Style Options

If you’re building a child theme and want to give users the ability to choose a color scheme from the Theme Settings page, this option is for you.

add_theme_support( 'genesis-style-selector', array( 'theme-blue' => 'Blue', 'theme-green' => 'Green', 'theme-orange' => 'Orange', 'theme-red' => 'Red' ) );

Just add this to your child theme’s functions.php file, and Genesis will handle the rest. A new box will appear in Theme Settings, and users can choose the color scheme for their site.

Genesis handles the body class, and all you have to do is build the CSS. Less coding. More designing. You know you love it! More here.

Code Standards and Inline Documentation

One of the core values of the Genesis coding style is that we want you to be able to find what you need without using a Genesis dictionary. Clarity is king. But how awesome would it be if each of the functions in Genesis had an explanation of what it did right above it? Done!

Thanks to Gary Jones, Genesis 1.8 is chock-full of inline documentation.

In addition, Genesis has been trying to move towards the WordPress coding standards for a few versions now. As of 1.8, I think we’re pretty much all the way there. Code now has room to breath, with plenty of whitespace for readability.

The Rest

Since WordPress 3.3.1 was recently released, Genesis 1.8 does require this latest version of WordPress. It’s always good to stay up to date anyway, so go ahead and upgrade with confidence knowing that Genesis is fully compatible.

To see a more comprehensive list of changes in Genesis 1.8, check out this page.

Note: Users of WordPress 3.2.1 or older will not be prompted to upgrade to Genesis 1.8 via their dashboard. Please upgrade to WordPress 3.3.1 first, then our update servers will prompt you to update within 24 hours.

So what are you waiting for?! Go upgrade, already!

Contributors

A very special thanks goes out to the developers that helped make Genesis 1.8 happen. Jared Atchison, Charles Clarkson, Chris Cochran, Nick Croft, David Decker, Remkus de Vries, Bill Erickson, Gary Jones, Travis Smith and Ade Walker.

New Look for Genesis

As you can see, the default look for Genesis has been updated. We’ve also added 2 media queries to the style sheet, which makes it mobile responsive for devices such as the iPad and iPhone.

Click to view the updated Genesis demo.

We’ve also consolidated some of the CSS required for menus, which you can read about here.

New Features with Genesis 1.8

Check out the Genesis 1.8 changelog and you’ll see that a number of things were fixed, added and modified. One of the biggest features that we’ve added is the Color Styles function.

Many of our child themes have color styles, which are currently being made available by code that’s included in the child theme’s function file as well as an additional file found within a ‘lib’ folder.

The new code that is required in the child themes would look like this:

/** Create additional color style options */
add_theme_support( 'genesis-style-selector', array( 'agentpress-gray' => 'Gray', 'agentpress-green' => 'Green', 'agentpress-red' => 'Red', 'agentpress-tan' => 'Tan' ) );

As with all functions that end up being placed into a number of child themes (custom header, footer widgets, etc) we’ve extracted that code out of them and placed it in to Genesis core.

How to Upgrade to Genesis 1.8 Beta

One of the very cool features that we’ve included in Genesis 1.8 is the ability to automatically update to Beta versions of Genesis. This is similar to the WordPress Beta Tester plugin that exists – the only difference is that users won’t have access to the bleeding version of Genesis.

Because the Genesis Beta Tester plugin relies on code that’s in Genesis 1.8, users will have to force the auto update script by replacing code. (This will only be required this time around.)

Inside the lib/functions/upgrade.php file, on line 29 you’ll see this:

'genesis_version' => PARENT_THEME_VERSION,

Replace that with this:

'genesis_version' => '0.1.3.3.7',

Once you have that uploaded the file to your server, click on the Appearance link in your WordPress dashboard, then head to the Dashboard main page and you should see a notification to update to Genesis 1.8 Beta.

Moving forward, once users have Genesis 1.8 any beta versions that are released will prompt an auto update notice for those who have the Genesis Beta Tester plugin active.

Reporting Bugs with Genesis 1.8 Beta

If you are testing Genesis 1.8 Beta and would like to report a bug, please reply to this thread on our forums. Please do not use that for feature requests, as we are done adding those into Genesis 1.8.

Special Thanks to Our Community

We’d like to thank the following developers for their contributions with the update to Genesis v1.8: Jared Atchison, Charles Clarkson, Chris Cochran, Nick Croft, David Decker, Remkus de Vries, Bill Erickson, Gary Jones, Travis Smith and Ade Walker.

Pure Elegance was developed by Auxano Creative, and can be found on the StudioPress Marketplace. As a reminder, these themes are not included in the Pro Plus All-Themes package, but we assure you that the design and coding of the themes are top-notch.

Theme Features

The Pure Elegance child theme includes the following features: 3 color styles, 6 layout options, custom background, custom header, featured images, fixed width, theme options, threaded comments.

Take it for a test drive…

Screenshot of the Pure Elegance Theme

Mobile Responsive Design

The Generate theme is the first child theme released here at StudioPress which has been developed to be mobile responsive in design.

Theme Features

The Generate theme includes the following features: 6 layout options, 4 theme colors (blue, green, orange, red), custom background, featured images, footer widgets, mobile responsive and threaded comments.

Take it for a test drive…

Screenshot of the Generate Theme

Copyblogger is a “blog” theme, which includes features such as 3 color styles, 6 page layouts, custom menus, footer widgets, responsive layout, threaded comments. (click to see demo)

Here’s a Screenshot of the Copyblogger Child Theme

Clip Cart was developed by the Themedy, and can be found on the StudioPress Marketplace. As a reminder, these themes are not included in the Pro Plus All-Themes package, but we assure you that the design and coding of the themes are top-notch.

Theme Features

The Clip Cart child theme includes the following features: Cart66 e-commerce integration, 6 layout options, custom background, custom header, featured images, fixed width, theme options, threaded comments.

Take it for a test drive…

Screenshot of the Clip Cart Theme

24k is a “blog” theme, which includes features such as 6 page layouts, custom background, custom header, custom menus, footer widgets, threaded comments. (click to see demo)

The 24k child theme was designed by Josh Byers, creative contributor of Copyblogger Media.

Here’s a Screenshot of the 24k Child Theme

Politica was developed by the Genesis Ninja, and can be found on the StudioPress Marketplace. As a reminder, these themes are not included in the Pro Plus All-Themes package, but we assure you that the design and coding of the themes are top-notch.

Theme Features

The Politica child theme includes the following features: 5 color styles (brown, charcoal, green, red and teal), 6 layout options, custom background, custom header, featured images, fixed width, theme options, threaded comments.

Take it for a test drive…

Screenshot of the Politica Theme