For years site owners have been trained that the main interface for their site is their hosting control panel. A lot has changed, however, since John Nick Koston invented the cPanel. For the serious site owner who uses WordPress, a hosting control panel is the last thing you want on your production site.
4 Simple Ways to Secure (and Maintain) Your WordPress Website
With the wind in my face and long stretches of open road before me, life is very good when I’m on my Harley.
I ride a lot, and as freeing as it can be, a good rider is always keenly aware of the high risks of being on a motorcycle. A good rider plans — as much as he or she can — for all kinds of contingencies.
The key to being a safe rider is the acceptance of risk.
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Introducing the Simple Social Icons Plugin for WordPress
I am very pleased to announce that we have released the Simple Social Icons plugin for WordPress. Simple Social Icons is an easy to use, customizable way to display icons that link visitors to your various social profiles.
With it, you can easily choose which profiles to link to, customize the color and size of your icons, as well as align them to the left or right, all from the widget form (no settings page necessary!).
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Genesis Framework v1.8 Now Available
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.
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.
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Responsive Design for Genesis Child Themes
With the exponential increase of mobile device and tablet users, the concept of responsive web design is becoming more relevant to what we do here at StudioPress. While there are some plugins that exist which make a theme “mobile”, we decided to take matters into our own hands.
While I was in San Francisco this summer for WordCamp, I had the pleasure of attending a session called Responsive Web Design given by Sara Cannon. (Follow her at @saracannon.)
There’s no denying the longterm effects that mobile devices will have on web design. Sara happens to think so as well:
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Genesis Framework v1.7 Now Available
With the release of WordPress 3.2, we’re happy to announce the follow-up release of Genesis v1.7. This update isn’t packed with features, but does have a few cool things to mention. (read the full list)
Genesis v1.7 requires WordPress 3.2, so anyone running an older version of WordPress will not receive the automatic update notice in their dashboard.
Updated Theme/SEO Settings
It’s no secret that one of the biggest changes in WordPress 3.2 is the design of the UI. It’s also no coincidence that the biggest change in Genesis v1.7 is the same thing – the design of the UI. In our case, we’ve updated the Theme/SEO Settings pages to match the new styling of WordPress.
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How to Make Money With WordPress (and Genesis)
As WordPress continues to grow and extend it’s user base, many folks are actively looking to exit their day jobs and figure out how to make money with WordPress. Mashable recently published a great article called 7 Ways to Build a Business Around WordPress, and we’d like to take this a step further.
We’d like to show you not only how to make money with WordPress, but also how to make money with the Genesis Framework. What do you say, are you interested?
Become a Developer and Build Client Sites
It’s no secret that a lot of folks are running on Genesis – in fact, our latest statistics show that well over a quarter million sites have the framework as the foundation of their web presence.
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Introducing Bill Erickson – Genesis Developer
Recently we celebrated the anniversary of the launch of the Genesis Framework – and wanted to spend the next year focusing on the Genesis development community. After all, without all of their hard work and contributions, Genesis wouldn’t be where it’s at.
With that being said, we plan on introducing you to the developers who’ve made a difference…
Meet Bill Erickson
Website: Bill Erickson · Twitter: @billerickson· Portfolio: View Showcase Sites
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GenesisConnect 1.0 Plugin for BuddyPress Available
We are very happy to announce the GenesisConnect plugin for BuddyPress is now available. Many of you are aware that Ron and Andrea Rennick had built an add-on called GenesisBuddy, which integrated Genesis and BuddyPress.
One of the issues was that GenesisBuddy took the form of a child theme that had to be integrated with our Genesis child themes in order to work. While the process wasn’t difficult, it added an extra step which together, we felt was unnecessary.
Rebuilding the GenesisBuddy Add-On
After discussions with Ron and Andrea, we decided that rewriting the code for GenesisBuddy was a good idea, and that there was a way to provide an easier solution to our users. Ron rebuilt the code in the form of a plugin, called GenesisConnect, and will be supported at StudioPress.
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Introducing the Simple URLs Plugin for WordPress
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.
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Genesis Theme Framework v1.2 Now Available
Genesis Theme Framework – version 1.2 is now available! We’ve been working on this release for a while now, and we’re SO excited to finally release it, alongside WordPress 3.0, a landmark update to the Genesis Theme Framework.
We’ve made it dead-simple to upgrade via our 1-click automatic update feature (since v1.1), so we highly recommend that you upgrade to WordPress 3.0 AND Genesis 1.2. You’ll be happy you did! Of course, our first priority with Genesis 1.2 was integrating the new WordPress 3.0 features into Genesis. The most exciting new feature is …
WordPress 3.0 Custom Menus
Among the minor bug fixes and enhancements, there are two main features that Genesis v1.2 includes. First, and foremost – Genesis’ navigation is seamlessly integrated with the new WordPress 3.0 custom navigation feature. By default, Genesis will register it’s two menu locations – primary and secondary navigation. You can see an example of the custom menu page below:
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Introducing the Genesis Framework
I am very happy to announce Genesis – an advanced theme framework for WordPress. This project has been in development for quite a while, and was something that has been on my mind for well over a year. We’re closing in on a beta version, something that we are very excited about!
About the Genesis Theme Framework
The Genesis theme framework is built on a simple vanilla blog-type parent theme, and can be extended with the use of child themes. Each child theme will come with it’s own home file, which will make extending the parent theme very easy to do. It will also have it’s own functions file as well.
A Note to Current Users and Developers
Don’t worry, we have built the Genesis theme framework in a way that will continue making your work of customizing our themes just as easy – if not easier. Theme files will still have organic WordPress code as our theme files do now.