Recap from Last Night

By Toby Cryns | July 27, 2012 | Comments Off on Recap from Last Night

Many thanks to Nick Ciske and the Westwerk Design guys, Travis and Nick, for their wonderful presentations at last night’s meeting!

Nick’s helpful links follow:

There was a lot of great discussion, and I must say that Nick made a compelling case for using Genesis.

UPDATE: Tim Cimbura‘s notes from Nick’s session are below.

Genesis is a paid theme Framework with many pre-built child themes. https://www.studiopress.com/
There are many smart people that built and support it. By paying money for it you help ensure that there will be future support.

Reasons to use Genesis Framework

Good
* Consistency and standardization. Save time when you need to go back to a site you built 2 years ago and you can remember the naming conventions you used because they are standardized.
* Pre-built child themes are well designed starting point
* Separate the data and presentation nicely
* Power – Let their team of really smart guys coding provide you value immediately when you install Genesis.
* Save time by using lots of pre-built and tested code. No need to reinvent the wheel.
* Security – Incorporates the latest code to protect your site.
* SEO – Optimized out of the box. Mark Jaquith codes at $350/hour and did the work for Genesis. When clients ask about SEO you can say it’s built into the core of your web site and it gets better with time.
* Genesis is responsive out of the box. Building a responsive theme yourself can take at least twice as much time. https://coding.smashingmagazine.com/2011/01/12/guidelines-for-responsive-web-design/
https://markjaquith.wordpress.com/
* WordPress upgrades don’t affect you much. They test the Genesis parent theme with new versions.
* Portabilty – Move from site to site and see similarities in the way they were built…even across different developers.
* Genesis plugins for WordPress are usually very high quality code. https://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/search.php?q=genesis
* Many plugins have connectors for Genesis like BuddyPress, WooCommerce, etc.
* One less thing to worry about when coding

Bad
* Learning curve
* Choosing a framework where development could be abandoned could be risky…but if you choose wisely you’re OK. Genesis is a very popular choice. Joomla is going down in popularity and might be a poor choice.

Ugly
* Some things are harder to do…but you can write a function and hook into nearly anything…it just requires thinking in a different way.

If you want to have your own starter framework, build yourself a child theme starter for Genesis and use that to begin your projects. Maybe fork a version of Bill Erickson’s theme from Github

Home


https://github.com/billerickson

Some additions to Genesis:
Bones for Genesis – Bones is a rock solid foundation to start any WordPress project with a Mobile-First responsive core.
https://themble.com/genesis/bones/

Carrington Core – WordPress template system
https://crowdfavorite.com/wordpress/carrington-core/

Hybrid Core – Hybrid Core is a WordPress theme development framework for creating solid parent themes. It allows theme developers to forget about all the complex functionality and dive straight into coding their theme’s HTML, CSS, and JavaScript.
https://themehybrid.com/hybrid-core

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