The team here at StudioPress is very pleased to announce today’s release: Genesis 2.4.0. This version of the Genesis framework includes several enhancements, bug fixes, and general housekeeping items.
A big thanks to Ron Rennick and Gary Jones for stepping up this release cycle and contributing tons of code. As always, this community continues impress. Thanks guys!
Read on to find out more about Genesis 2.4.
Continue Reading →about Genesis 2.4 for WordPress Now Available
In our ongoing effort to make sure your Genesis sites are prepared for any new WordPress features and updates, we’re releasing Genesis 2.3.1 ahead of the upcoming WordPress 4.6 release.
Genesis contributors Nick Cernis and Gary Jones helped identify and fix a bug in Genesis 2.3 that caused the dreaded white screen (fatal error) when testing with the WordPress 4.6 beta. It’s a very small change, so you can upgrade with confidence.
The update is available via your dashboard now, and we ask that you update immediately to alleviate any issues when WordPress 4.6 is released.
Every once in a while, I’ll run across a site running Genesis. Actually, it’s more than every once in a while, but what do you expect when so many people use Genesis?! But anyway, I’ll visit a site running Genesis and notice that they’re running Genesis as the active theme, instead of using a child theme. I can’t help but shake my head, because not only is this incredibly risky, but we actively recommend that you DO NOT run Genesis as the active theme on any site.
But why not? There are several reasons, actually.
Whenever you read a tutorial for adding or removing things from your site output, it’s likely that the tutorial will says “put this code in your child theme’s functions.php file.” It’s hard to do that when you’re not running a child theme.
Continue Reading →about Why You Should Always Use a Child Theme with Genesis
Occasionally, even the most mature software needs a little freshening up. Instead of focusing on big new features and large changes, we opted to go through the backlog of bug reports and enhancement suggestions. The result is a much more polished and stable Genesis Framework.
We have big plans for Genesis 2.4 and beyond! So making sure that we focused on these important details seemed like the logical choice for a 2.3 release.
Check out the improvements in 2.3 below!
This coming Monday, March 7th, we’ll be releasing Genesis 2.2.7 to fix some issues with WordPress compatibility, as well as fix an issue with term meta performance.
UPDATE: To give developers more time to prepare their plugins and sites, we will NOT be introducing the breaking change, outlined below, in Genesis 2.2.7. Instead, we will push it to Genesis 2.3.0. Genesis 2.2.7 will still release on Monday, March 7th, to address other bugs.
If you have built a plugin that relies on the Genesis term meta system in order to function, it’s incredibly important that you prepare your plugin for Genesis 2.2.7 2.3.0. If your plugin relies on Genesis to store and serve term meta, you will very likely receive messages from your users saying that it’s no longer working.
Continue Reading →about Important Announcement for Genesis Plugin Developers
We don’t normally publish much about our maintenance releases–usually because they’re to fix bugs or correct regressions introduced in a previous release–but we felt like Genesis 2.2.6 deserves an explanation, especially for those of you who are interested in and enjoy the way Genesis handles Schema.org integration through our markup API.
When we first introduced Schema.org integration in Genesis, we wanted to try to be a specific as we possibly could. For example, if we knew a search results page was being displayed, we would make sure to mark that page as a search results page using microdata.
In that same spirit, we wanted to make sure that blog posts got marked up as a “blogPosting” content type.
Ever since the release of Genesis 2.0 and the introduction of the HTML5 markup structure, we’ve been extremely happy with the maturity and stability of the framework. Very few bugs have come up, and we continue to grow the Genesis developer and user community by extraordinary numbers every month.
3300+ members of an unofficial, community run #GenesisWP Facebook group.
That amazes me.
Genesis has a long tradition of being extremely flexible for the average user while at the same time remaining developer friendly. This latest release continues that tradition in a big way. Our sincere thanks to a group of Genesis power users for helping turn Genesis 1.8 into a developer’s dream, without sacrificing any of the usability that we’ve all come to know and love.
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.
Continue Reading →about Genesis Framework v1.8 Now Available
Since its conception over one year ago, Genesis has always been about offering valuable features, while at the same time allowing maximum control through the use of intelligent Theme Settings, liberal use of action hooks and filters, and semantic markup. This is our driving passion, and today, Genesis 1.4 proves yet again that it is the only framework you’ll ever need.
This release has a little something for everyone. It offers more control to developers who use Genesis to run their development business; it offers more SEO control for professional publishers; and it offers increased flexibility for bloggers and casual users too!
Ready to talk specifics? Let’s do it …
Continue Reading →about Genesis Framework v1.4 Now Available
How many times have you wanted to know exactly how many times that link you put in your blog post has been clicked? Have you ever wanted to shorten those long, ugly affiliate URLs? Well, if you answered “Yes” to either of those questions, Simple URLs is the plugin for you.
Simple URLs is a URL management system allowing you to create, edit and track any URL you want.
Now, I know there are URL shortening services out there that will do this for you, but when you’re placing links on your OWN site, it’s a bit unprofessional to link off to a URL shortening service. With Simple URLs, the links you publish will be from your own domain.
Continue Reading →about Introducing the Simple URLs Plugin for WordPress
