In my previous post on the topic I discussed the pros and cons and came to this conclusion:

For me personally, I’m all about options. I love working with a WordPress Theme Framework that allows me to have a very high level of control over how specific I want to be in what I want my theme to output. I don’t mind the learning, in fact I love learning, and when you know your way around the forums you’ll be able to either find what you were looking for or get a working answer of your fellow developers. Plus, having a Parent Theme that is continuously updated is big plus for me.

So even though you could argue a framework is bloat and adds a lot of stuff that you perhaps won’t ever need, to me that’s irrelevant because you only load what is needed and I could care less about how much kB the themes take up on the server.

Why I Choose Genesis

Both Hybrid as Thematic are loaded with hooks and filter and Genesis is no exception to that rule. So, if hooks and filters aren’t the reason why I choose Genesis then what are? Lot’s of other great stuff.

Flexibility of Layout

Sure, both Hybrid and Thematic let you decide what what type of layout you would like by selecting the proper layout style sheet in your style.css, but none make it as easy as Genesis. All you have to do to is select which layout you’d like for the site in the general settings. All other layouts you can select on a per post or page basis. How’s that for flexibility?

Featured Pages and Featured Posts widgets

One of my favorite Genesis features are the Featured Posts and Featured Pages widgets. With these widgets I can pretty much create any list of pages or posts I can think of. You can select which category, number of posts, number of posts to offset, whether you want to show the author Gravatar but also what type of content of these posts and pages you want to show additionally. For example, Post Title, Byline, Content vs. Excerpt are all optional. You get to choose how your content is shown. What more flexibility could you ask for?

Great SEO options

As of version 1.3 Genesis is sporting some extensive SEO options. Most importantly, Genesis lets you implement your SEO settings on a sitewide, post and pages level, but also per category, tag, custom post types and custom taxonomies. For a full featured list of what Genesis SEO can do for you, visit the release post on the StudioPress blog.

Automatic Framework Updates

The proper – as in the only correct – way to use Genesis is by using Child Themes. StudioPress offers automatic updates, just like your WordPress.org theme would do. This means you can easily update Genesis and all your settings will remain intact in your child theme. So when a when a new version of WordPress comes loaded with new features like 3.0 did with custom post types or custom menu’s, the Genesis Framework will be updated with these new options as well and by simply updating Genesis you will have to options available for your site automagically.

Hooks, filter & actions

Like any decent WordPress theme framework, Genesis comes loaded with hooks for you to take advantage of through filters and actions. See the Genesis website for a complete list of hooks.

Genesis Translations

One of the strong features of Genesis is that everything in Genesis is fully translatable. There are currently quite a few translations already out there, such as Dutch, German, French, Spanish, Finnish etc. Genesis will even work with RTL languages such a Arabic and Hebrew. Activating the languages is a simple as uploading the proper .mo and .po files to the proper server and that should be it. Nothing should hold you back to get your hands on that ever expanding Pro Plus All-Theme Package full of child themes..

GenesisConnect: BuddyPress meet Genesis

With BuddyPress growth continueing it’s good to know that Genesis als has this covered. Ron & Andrea Rennick of PremiumBPthemes.com in collaboration with StudioPress offer Genesis Buddy. An easy way to get your Genesis powered website working perfectly with BuddyPress, even adding extra features. Find out more about the GenesisConnect plugin for BuddyPress by StudioPress.

In Conclusion

As far as I am concerned Genesis is the leading WordPress Theme Framework out there. Not only is it a very robust and complete framework, but it’s is continuously being developed into even a better one. The community and support forum of StudioPress is top notch, and really I’m proud to be part of it.

If you’re serious about developing sites with WordPress do consider using the Genesis Framework as your base. Once you have, you’ll never go back. Trust me.

You can purchase the Genesis Framework either as is, or bundle it with one of the available child themes or go for the Pro Plus All-Theme Package.

Why I Choose The Genesis Theme Framework is a post from: ForSite Media

As a webshop owner you want to have your product name and categories before the actuall site title. Now, Shopp does do exactly that but it also adds ‘Shop’ in front of it, plus it sticks that to the product and category title. Luckily there is a solution.

In your theme functions.php you need to add a few lines of code.

[php]//Optimizing Shopp pages for SEO
function forsite_seo_shopp_titles ($title,$sep=" — ") {

global $Shopp; // Access the Shopp data structure
$titles = array(); // An array to keep track of the title elements

if (shopp(‘catalog’,'is-category’)) // Build the category page titles
$titles = array($Shopp->Category->name);

if (shopp(‘catalog’,'is-product’)) // Build the product page titles
$titles = array($Shopp->Product->name);

return join($sep,$titles);
}

add_action(‘wp’, ‘forsite_change_titles_on_shopp_pages’);
function forsite_change_titles_on_shopp_pages(){
if ( is_page(‘X’)) {
add_filter(‘wp_title’, ‘forsite_seo_shopp_titles’,11,2);
}
}[/php]

The code is pretty self-explanatory with the inline comments but just in case it’s a bit fuzzy I’ll explain a bit more. The first code harvests the titles of the categories and products and puts them in an array called $titles which will be returned joined with the separator ($sep). Now in itself this first function works great, but if we were to use the add_filter code with just this one function in place we would lose the proper titles on your regular WordPress pages and posts. Not something we want, right?

To make sure this filter is only applied to Shopp related pages, remember Shopp uses one particular page as a base, we need to apply the add_filter code to only that one page. So, look up the page_id of that particular code and replace the X with that ID number and you’ll be fixed. The filter will only be applied if we’re on a Shopp related page and that’s exactly how we wanted it.

Optimizing Your Shopp Page Titles for SEO is a post from: ForSite Media

I know, at some point in time those mailinglist (WP Hackers, WP Testers, WP Polyglots) were the best and easiest solution to deal with a lot of issue, but personally I think it’s time to move on. I’m mostly active in the Dutch WordPress community as a forum moderator, site admin and responsible of the translation commits and in that capacity I’ve had to work a lot with the WP Polyglots mailing list lately. Not a perfect solution at all when you have a lot of questions and get a lot of answers.

What’s great about the guys behind WordPress is that most of the time you come with a decent suggestions they are willing to listen and that’s exactly what happened this weekend. As soon as Peter suggested it and Zé agreed upon it being a good idea the site was born. That’s how swiftly it can go. The WP Polyglot mailinglist got ‘rerouted’ to a dedicated site on WordPress.com called WPPolyglots.wordpress.com. Again, another great example of how wonderfully the P2 theme works in these kinds of settings.

All questions regarding the translation of WordPress, BuddyPress, bbPress but also questions concerning setting up a country site and forum should now be addressed here. And the great thing about it is that it’s so much easier to share the knowledge in this way. I’m working on a Resources page where all the proper Codex pages will be listed plus a list with the best course of actions to make translating a happier process.

WP Polyglots Takes The Lead and Moves From Mailinglist to Site is a post from: ForSite Media

Now, the example is for the Genesis Framework, but really the logic behind will work on any child theme using filters. What I wanted to filter was the output of the post meta area, which normally displays both the categories and the tags. I wanted to use a slightly different post meta on the homepage where the tags would be replaced with a Continue reading link.

This is what the filter looks like:

[php]//Customizing Post Meta
function forsite_post_meta_filter($post_meta) {
$post_meta = ‘[post_ categories], <a href="’. get_permalink() .’" title="’. the_title_attribute(‘echo=0′) .’">Continue Reading</a>’;
return $post_meta;
}[/php]

As you can see I am just adding a permalink with a ‘Continue Reading’ text. Nothing too fancy. Normally you would add your filter and you’d be all done. Like so:

[php]//Customizing Post Meta
function forsite_post_meta_filter($post_meta) {
$post_meta = ‘[post_ categories], <a href="’. get_permalink() .’" title="’. the_title_attribute(‘echo=0′) .’">Continue Reading</a>’;
return $post_meta;
}

add_filter(‘genesis_post_meta’, ‘forsite_post_meta_filter’);[/php]

Using Conditial Tags with this filter actually requires the use of an add_action statement. The way to do is by declaring another function which handles the conditional tags. Something like this

[php]function forsite_post_meta_conditionals() {
if( is_home() || is_category() ) {
add_filter(‘genesis_post_meta’, ‘forsite_post_meta_filter’);
}
}

add_action(‘wp’, ‘forsite_post_meta_conditionals’);[/php]

The if statement determines to actually use this filter only whether you are looking at the home page or the category view. Combined the full code looks like this:

[php]//Customizing Post Meta
function forsite_post_meta_filter($post_meta) {
$post_meta = ‘[post_ categories], <a href="’. get_permalink() .’" title="’. the_title_attribute(‘echo=0′) .’">Continue Reading</a>’;
return $post_meta;
}
function forsite_post_meta_conditionals() {
if( is_home() || is_category() ) {
add_filter(‘genesis_post_meta’, ‘forsite_post_meta_filter’);
}
}
add_action(‘wp’, ‘forsite_post_meta_conditionals’);[/php]

On all occasions where I used post_categories in these code snippets I’ve added an extra blank space between the underscore and categories for it otherwise shows the actual content. So when implementing this code, be sure to delete that extra space!

More info on conditional tags can be found in the Codex, and more information on WordPress filters. Have you worked with conditional tags and / or filters before?

This article first appeared on Devlounge.

Conditional Logic and Filters for the Genesis Framework is a post from: ForSite Media

RSS is supposed to deliver your content as clean as possible, but there are however a few things you can do to optimize the output of your RSS. Here a few plugins that can help you out:

Align RSS Images

Align RSS Images is a simple plugin that scans your RSS feed and ensures that every image has the correct alignment and margin settings. This is useful if you want the images to appear correctly aligned not just on your site, but also in your RSS feed. Download Align RSS Images.

RSS Syndication Options

A plugin to let the administrator modify the RSS sy:updateperiod and sy:updatefrequency parameters in their RSS feed (see http://purl.org/rss/1.0/modules/syndication/). These parameters tell RSS aggregators how frequently they can expect changes to your blog, and should in theory affect crawl rates. Download RSS Syndication Options.

Ozh’ Better Feed

Your feed, on steroids : add a custom footer to RSS items with, for example, a copyright notice, a “Read More (400 words)” links, an “Add to del.icio.us” link, a list of related entries, or anything really (even custom PHP functions). Compatible with Feedburner or similar services. Download Ozh’ Better Feed.

Feed Delay

I think the title pretty much says it all but Feed Delay lets you stop a feed from immediately being published. Plus, you can also disable individual posts from appearing in feeds. Download Feed Delay.

Smart Youtube

What’s a YouTube plugin doing in this list you may ask? This plugin allows you to embed video’s in your feed. As explained on the plugin site: Smart Youtube is a WordPress Youtube Plugin that allows you to easily insert Youtube videos/playlists in your post, comments and in RSS feed.

The main purpose of the plugin is to correctly embed youtube videos into your blog post. The video will be shown in full in your RSS feed as well. Download Smart YouTube.

Extra Resources:

If you’d like to even optimize your feeds more there a dozens of hacks you can have a look at.

• How To Use RSS Feeds When You Use WordPress As a CMS.
• 10 Useful RSS Hacks
• WordPress tip : Fetch and display RSS feeds
• Adding a CSS StyleSheet to your RSS Feed
• WordPress hack: Display Posts Only to RSS Subscribers
• 9 Extremely Useful RSS Tricks and Snippets for WordPress

This article first appeared on BloggingPro: Optimizing Your WordPress RSS Feeds

How To: Serve Better RSS Feeds To Your Subscribers is a post from: ForSite Media

The Good

Building with child themes has a lot of powerful advantages. My favorite are:

• Development Speed: Having an already working theme as a parent theme, a theme that already has been looked at from a lot of different angels as to what it should be able to do, and already some basic styling in place makes it a lot easier to quickly make some changes via the child theme style sheet.
• Lots of options: Most Theme Frameworks I know have a lot of options built in. I’m not talking about having a lot of buttons and checkboxes added necessarily, but more-so a robust framework with lots of nifty PHP functions and CSS specificity options to configure.
• Great communities behind the frameworks Any of the three Theme Frameworks I mentioned earlier make working with their specific Parent Theme so great because there’s is a great community behind it, not afraid to share inventive solutions and best practices.
• Future Proof Working with a Parent Theme that is in constant state of development also makes it very easy to stay up to date and incorporate all the latest WordPress goodies. For example the stuff that WordPress 3.0 brings to the table.

The Bad

Like I said before, there are some disadvantages on using a Theme Frameworks such as:

• Bloat: When you’re only creating a small, pretty straight forward site, a lot of the theme functions added by the Parent Theme’s library could be considered bloat en thus not creating a lean and mean theme, which I know you all care about.
• Forced Direction When creating a child theme you sort of get dictated (and I use that term very loosely) to make heavy use of your functions.php and wrapping your head around filters and hooks can be daunting if diving into PHP isn’t your thing. It may seem redundant to duplicate and and all theme files into your child theme if that’s what you need to do.
• Learning Curve There is a bit of a learning curve when working with child theme for the first time. Your basic level of PHP and CSS won’t do, you need to step up and start learning.

Why Use Them Anyway?

For me personally, I’m all about options. I love working with a WordPress Theme Framework that allows me to have a very high level of control over how specific I want to be in what I want my theme to output. I don’t mind the learning, in fact I love learning, and when you know your way around the forums you’ll be able to either find what you were looking for or get a working answer of your fellow developers. Plus, having a Parent Theme that is continuously updated is big plus for me.

Have you ever worked with or considered working with child themes when developing on a theme? And if so, do you favor either Genesis, Thematic or Hybrid over the other (or any other WordPress Theme Framework for that matter)?

WordPress Frameworks, Have You Taken a Closer Look Yet? is a post from: ForSite Media

Backing up your software sounds like a chore to most of us out there, but I guarantee you you will thank yourself for doing it plus there a plenty of solutions to automate it.

Perhaps you’re not really sure when to backup and when not? Here’s just a few things you could be doing that in my opinion requires a backup first:

• Activating a plugin that uses the database to store it’s settings and other stuff
• Adding a sweet code snippet to your functions.php
• When you’re about to modify any theme template file.
• Before updating your WordPress installation to the latest WordPress version (on a sidenote: WordPress released it’s 3.0 RC2)
• Adding just a few lines of CSS to any stylesheet

There a few things you should backup on a regular basis:

• Your Theme folder
• The complete contents of wp-content
• The complete WordPress installation
• Your Database

The frequency of these backup depend entirely on how active your site is, but my general rule of thumb is at least every day. At least. Backing up your theme folder every now and then is only really necessary if you’re one of those people who like to temper with the different template files and your style sheet. But again, better be safe then sorry so there’s really no overkill in these kinds of things.

I know you keep hearing everybody talk about it, but these things ARE really life savers. So confession time: honestly, how well are you prepared for accidental screw ups, hardware failures or even hacked sites? How many times do you back up?

This article first appeared on BloggingPro: The Good And The Bad About Working With Theme Frameworks

Photo Credit: Pong

Humor Yourself, Backup Your WordPress Site is a post from: ForSite Media

Perhaps you have noticed here on BloggingPro most images in post do not exceed the 240px range, but of course not all images can be found in exact that width. Most of the time you need to crop or resize those images you found to the proper width size.

I don’t know about you, but if I don’t have to fire up Photoshop or GIMP for such an easy task I’d rather not.  Furtunatly WordPress comes built in with a solution. We even mentioned it before.

After you have uploaded an image you are given the chance to edit that image. Yes, that same screen where you decide what alignment you want to give that image, where to link it at, what title the image should have, that’s where you can actually edit the image. Right next to the thumbnail image it says <em>Edit Image</em>

That <em>Edit Image</em> certainly is not a replacement for Photoshop and the likes, but you can perform some basic actions like scaling, my favorite. To show you what I mean I actually created a short screen cast of editing an image to scale a 800px wide image back to 230px.

This is just an example of what you can do, as you have seen there are more things you can do with that image. A function in WordPress people in general make very little use of, mostly because they don’t know it’s there.Were you aware of this function and if so have you ever used it?

This article first appeared on BloggingPro:Scaling Images via the Image Upload Function in WordPress

Edit Images in WordPress is a post from: ForSite Media

Just a Few Steps

The only thing you need to do for this to work is installing the Theme Test Drive. There is a different way of seeing how your site would look like in a new a new theme, by the way. All you need to do is navigate to the Theme you would like to preview in your Theme menu and right click the link that says Preview and in the following menu you select Open in New Tab (or whatever similar your browser provides you). A new tab will open in browser showing you what your site looks like sporting the new Theme. This is however not a solid solution when it comes to testing the different pages and using widgets for example.

After having installed and activated Theme Test Drive plugin you will see an extra menu in Appearance which allows you to select what Theme you would like to test drive. By enabling the Theme of preference and selecting the proper user level, in other words should only admins be able to see the new Theme?

And We’re Done Already

All there is left for you to do is navigate to your site by clicking Visit Site in the top of your WordPress Dashboard and there you have it. The beauty of this solution is that it allows you to treat this new Theme as if though it would actually be live and that means you also have a new set of sidebars where you need to configure your widgets to get the result you’re looking for.

When you want to make adjustments to your currrent Theme, simply download a copy to your computer via FTP, rename the folder and adjust the Header part of your style.css with a higher version number, save it and upload it to your themes directory. In effect changing it from something like this:

[css]/*
Theme Name: Your Theme
Theme URL: http://www.themeurl.com/
Description: Your Current Rocking Theme
Author: Remkus de Vries
Author URI: http://remkusdevries.com
Version: 1.0
*/
[/css]

to

[css]/*
Theme Name: Your Theme
Theme URL: http://www.themeurl.com/
Description: Your New Rocking Theme
Author: Remkus de Vries
Author URI: http://remkusdevries.com
Version: 2.0
*/
[/css]

Now select the higher version of your current theme in the Theme Test Drive menu. That’s it. Happy fiddling!

Note: Even though this a great way to change a few things here and there, I do recommend setting up a proper copy of your site in, for instance a subdomain combined with a plugin like Maintenance Mode, when you are really getting your hands dirty.

This article first appeared on BloggingPro: Working Behind the WordPress Curtains

Working on Your WordPress Site Behind The Curtains is a post from: ForSite Media

Now a while back this would’ve not been the most interesting problem in need of a solution, but since WordPress is being used as CMS more and more and thus only using static pages, a proper solution is in need.

The two solutions, in the shape of plugins, I have used for this on a couple of recent projects I did are the following are the following:

RSS Includes Pages

This plugin modifies your RSS feeds so that they include pages and not just posts. Including pages in your feed is particularly useful if you’re using WordPress as a CMS where pages represent a good portion of your content.

Find out more at the plugin’s page.

Page Feeder

Page Feeder lets you easily create and customise an RSS feed for your pages. Customize your feed using the settings page or via URL parameters. This plugin is great for those who use WordPress as a CMS solution and is my personal favorite.

Find out more at the plugin’s page.

So there you have two solid solutions on using your WordPress as a static page only CMS. How many times have you used WordPress with static pages only?

This article first appeared on BloggingPro: How To Use RSS Feeds When You Use WordPress As a CMS

Adding Pages to Your RSS Feed in WordPress is a post from: ForSite Media