Category: Tutorials

  • Genesis Explained Admin Class

    Genesis 1.8 introduced a whole new admin system. As I was writing the previous articles in the Admin section of the Genesis Explained series I saw that this system was being updated, so I decided to wait on any further articles until Genesis 1.8 came out and settled in. The new admin system is OOP…

  • How to Add a Widgeted Area (a.k.a. Sidebar)

    How to Add a Widgeted Area (a.k.a. Sidebar)

    One question we get all the time is, “how do you add a new widgeted area to Genesis?” With a little bit of code this can be handled with relative ease. First, this tutorial requires novice to moderate php experience. You will be editing the functions.php file so make sure you have a backup of…

  • Site Recovery Tips and Tricks

    Site Recovery Tips and Tricks

    Something bad is happening on your WordPress site. You try to login and have a white screen, or the entire site has been replaced with error messages. You’re heart is starting to race. Sweat is beading in your face. How will you fix this? First, calm down. The solution is probably pretty simple. You need…

  • Theme Customization Basic Skills

    Theme Customization Basic Skills

    So, you have a nice new theme with tons of features, but you want to make changes so it will be uniquely yours. You are at a crossroad. Do you hire a developer or do you become a developer? There are risks and benefits for both. A skilled developer will know how to accomplish things…

  • Format text widgets for valid urls

    Format text widgets for valid urls

    Typically when you copy HTML from other sites with complex URIs in the src or href values, the text widgets won’t validate. It is possible to manually update your html, but this can be very tedious, and if you aren’t perfect, your code will break. I recently ran into this with a client and started…

  • Social Menu Icons Using Sprites

    Social Menu Icons Using Sprites

    Have you ever used yslow, or some other method of evaluating your site load speed? If you have you probably got a warning that using sprites will speed up your site by reducing server calls for individual images. If you are like me, the first time you saw that you were thinking about how you…

  • Custom Post Types Made Easy

    Custom Post Types Made Easy

    Post types aren’t really that hard to start with. You start with some template code, then make a few changes and bam! Now you have a custom post type. However, teh code can get clunky if you register several CPTs. On this blog I have a single CPT, for the child themes used by my…

  • Show Related Posts with Thumbnails in Genesis

    Show Related Posts with Thumbnails in Genesis

    I looked into a lot of related posts plugins for my personal blog, then remembered, I’m a theme developer, I bet I could write a very simple related posts script myself. The code I ended up using only takes 2 things into account, what tag is the post using and what category is it in.…

  • Control Post Order With Genesis Featured Widget Amplified plugin

    Control Post Order With Genesis Featured Widget Amplified plugin

    I have a confession, a lot of the features in my Genesis Featured Widget Amplified plugin are purely selfish. I needed hooks in the Genesis Featured Post widget for a client or else I was going to need a custom widget just for this one project. So I built the plugin. I wanted a drop…

  • Skip Terms

    Skip Terms

    Back when I first started my personal blog, I was using a theme with a custom home page and no blog page template. This posed a problem as I didn’t have a good archive for all of my posts, so I setup a default category “All” that every post was added to. This worked pretty…