Genesis for Wordpress By: Ronald Pannullo

Genesis is a fully responsive wordpress theme framework. It can be a theme but it is primarily just a foundation. Fully customizable so developers of all skill levels have the site of their dreams.Sample Theme Customized Theme What is Genesis?

Child Themes! Install the Genesis framework then install the child theme over. Now make any changes to the child theme without affecting the actual Genesis. Updates to Genesis don’t affect your child theme. So How Does Genesis Work?

What is this nonsense you speak of? Genesis is the framework, like the foundation of your house. Child theme is the house. GENESIS CHILD THEME CHILD THEME?!?!?!

So what’s the point here? o wordpress is constantly getting updated. o themes get updated. o when a theme gets an update any customizations made are now gone.  no they aren’t. I pulled out my customizations, ran the update, put my customizations back in after. and yes that was highly annoying and time consuming. o Put your Genesis foundation down, put your child theme on top of it, fully customize your theme and site, run genesis update, child theme stays perfectly intact. Really it just makes sense. Child Theme?!?!?!?!!?

This all sounds great but it has to be incredibly complicated, right? o WRONG!!!! For those of us who aren’t the most code savvy, there are child themes built by wonderful developers out there. Simply upload, install, and customize. o But we’re web designers and developers. We want more control, we want to hand code and build ourselves. So let’s build a Genesis Child theme and see how simple it really is. So...How Does it Work?

So first all you do is upload and install Genesis, DO NOT ACTIVATE IT!!! o just install it and leave it sitting there. you’re done with it forever. Now only 2 files are needed to make a child theme; functions.php and styles.css o go ahead and make a directory as follows wp- content/themes/YOUR_THEME_NAME o go get the stylesheet from the genesis and copy and paste it in your directory  now you have to change the theme name in the stylesheet to your themes, the description, the author and author URI Building a Child Theme

This is what I mean by changing the name and description and author info. this is in the top of the stylesheet you copied over. They are in comments. Changing Theme Name

Building Cont. Functions.php

The previous slide is all you need for a functioning functions.php Store this in the same directory as your styles.css As you customize the site you will be making changes to it and adding to it but that is the most basic file you need to make your site work. But we wanna customize it, that’s why we are using Genesis. Functions.php

Anything can be changed. The header, the footer, the main content, the styles Changes can be made in the front or back end. Genesis has great support and countless tutorials out there showing you how make any customization to your child theme, or paid for child theme. Unfortunately Genesis isn’t free so unless you wanna buy it you can’t go home now and dabble with it, but I challenge you to just go research and find out what changes would be made to your code to customize your header, footer, homepage, creating a responsive menu etc. You’ll find it actually isn’t very difficult. So What Can we Change?