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Originally Posted by Jezella
On reading your reply Robert I register a great deal of passion for the product where you defend it well. I note also your 2000 posts so it might be considered that you have got to grips well with what we are dealing with.
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I have no idea who Robert is, but yes, I have a passion for the product, but I'm usually one of the first to should loudly and aggressively if something is amiss with Genesis (there have been 158 tickets on Trac, I've started 110 of them), so its not a case of straight defence, but an explanation into how I think SP covers most bases of documentation and support.
It's good that you're willing to read around the subject, and want to learn how to do thinks yourself.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Jezella
Next I want my name and logo at the top so in effect I’m becoming a developer.
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Certainly a lot of the newer themes make use of the native WP function of custom header (under the Appearance menu), as does Genesis itself - I'd say this is site administration, rather than development (which I tend to see as working directly with files and code).
Quote:
Originally Posted by Jezella
I do the right thing and lookup under the developers section of StudioPress and discover hooks! What are hooks – I’m not fishing. This is my first confusion. Here from my point of view, the documentation is poor.
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Now we're getting somewhere.
Hooks for actions and filters are something inherent to WordPress core, all themes, and all plugins - it's not Genesis specific. As such, SP covers the basics on the
introduction to hooks page, and links through to the Codex Plugin API page that explains it in more detail - there's no point in duplicating efforts. SP should be focusing on documenting SP-related features, while guiding users to other resources for wider WP concepts. This is what it does.
A Google search for 'wordpress hooks' would also bring up the Plugin API page, and slightly lower down, SP's own Nathan Rice's personal article on it.
It may be that the concept is a difficult one to grasp for some people, especially non-coders, but then it's also likely that they don't need to fully understand it - the novices we talked about simply need to copy and paste code. Those who do want to be able to write code customisations from scratch will do exactly what you did (look on Dev.SP, look on other sites including the Codex) and read up on the subject. So, the documentation has guided you to what you want. What SP *does* do, is provide a Hooks Reference page (to be honest, it's slightly out of date as a few new action hooks have been added since, but there is a Trac ticket to fix this) for those bits that *are* specific to the Genesis Framework.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Jezella
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Again, with all respect to Nick and his site, the novice users who you think are lacking documentation for their level would be scared witless by the copy and paste of the framework.php file in there - that file is never needed for customisations. You'll also note that Nick's article links back to the SP resources, since everything that's needed is covered in SP documentation already.
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Originally Posted by Jezella
I think that one of the biggest problems is that when one opens a genesis file they see almost nothing.
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Novice users should only be opening the style.css and functions.php files, and they certainly won't be empty. They shouldn't ever need to open other Genesis files; if they *do*, then they aren't novices, and will likely have sufficient coding ability to be able to work out what's what anyway.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Jezella
I should not find myself referring to the Thesis documentation to try and gain an understanding of Genesis.
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Can you give an example of where Thesis documentation covers Genesis-specific aspects (not WP or PHP knowledge) better than StudioPress documentation?
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Originally Posted by Jezella
The first reply to this post by hiller54. Does this not tell you something.
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No, it doesn't. Should it?
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Originally Posted by Jezella
I almost feel that I am in battle with Genesis/StudioPress. This is not the case, the product is fantastic, the price is fair and the licence is good and to my mind and especially considering that it is a newer product, given time could potentially knock the socks off Thesis.
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When I moved from the Thesis community to the Genesis community and their products, my overall summary was (and always has been) that Genesis works with WP, whereas Thesis works against it - take the look of the settings panels for instance, or that until Thesis 1.8 you couldn't use Thesis as a parent/child set up (something that's been possible with Genesis since ~1.1/1.2).
Many in the wider WP community already believe that Genesis is better than Thesis (and it is, on so many aspects), and community support can be snapshotted by looking at the recent WP Candy Theme Madness results. There's a reason that so many (like you, like me) moved from Thesis to Genesis, including former DIYThemes partner Brian Clark (aka Copyblogger). When the boss of a product leaves that product in favour of a competitor, you know things are bad.