New theme…

I‘ve begun using Genesis on some of my client’s websites and thought I would give it a try here. I still kind of miss using plain old WordPress, but there are some interesting things about Genesis. I’ve heard it’s smart to use a WordPress framework, but still don’t if it’s really necessary. Perhaps it used to be more important? I don’t know, but I’m going to be using it here to help me figure it out.

Genesis Framework LogoAnyway…. I made my basic child theme out of the Genesis sample child theme and will be modifying it as time goes on. I installed some free plugins made for Genesis. I already have a bunch of WordPress plugins installed that I like. Some of my faves can be found here (by clicking on favorites): http://profiles.wordpress.org/greybird ….I don’t endorse all of them but most of them are very good and I’m grateful to the authors who make them. I admit I often favorite plugins that I intend to try someday or that I’ve used in the past, just so I have them all in an easy to find library.

Today since I installed Genesis I installed my favorite Genesis plugins:

The above are all free plugins and can be found on the WordPress.org site.

Genesis Simple Hooks and Genesis Visual Hook Guide are so far in combo one of my favorite things about Genesis. I installed a slider using a conditional statement (so it only shows up on the homepage and the blog page) into Simple Hooks. It took me a while to find the right conditional statement. But this one worked so I’m sticking with it.

<?php if( is_home() || is_front_page() ) : ?>
[shortcode]
<?php endif; ?>

Like this:

header_before_header hook

At this point I’m using the slider plugin Meta Slider. With Meta Slider, there is a shortcode to restrict the slider to just the homepage, so I could do it that way as well. (Update 12/29/16: I am now using the excellent Smart Slider 3. Smart Slider 3 has many more options than Meta Slider, including layers and custom responsive design.

I did get some validation errors using Meta Slider, but found the documentation very good and discovered the solution to that problem. They suggested installing W3 Total Cache to minify the CSS. It fixed the validation errors but made my slider act strangely when using the Flex setting (it was flashing between slides, not fading). So I changed it to the Nivo setting and so far so good. Oddly on another site when I used the Nivo setting it rendered the slider non-responsive, but it seems to work fine here.

Bye for now,
Elizabeth