July Meetup

When: July 7th 6:00pm to 7:30pm
Where: Chattanooga Public Library (4th Floor Downtown)
What: The Genesis Theme Framework (Robin Cornett, Beau Moffatt, & James Laws)
Link to Slides: Genesis Framework on Steroids

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MeetUp Notes:

A bit about the presenters:
James Laws works for the WP Ninjas.
Beau works for Open Sky Web Studio
Robbin is a self-employed web developer.

• What is Genesis?
  • Genesis is a theme framework, this means it does all the hard work for you.
• Why should I use Genesis?
  • It is extremely flexible
  • it has SEO built in
  • Great security
  • Beautiful mobile responsive designs.
• How do I use Genesis?
  • You install the framework as your parent theme. then choose a child theme you would like to use.
  • You can make tweaks to the child themes on the back-end of your WordPress site
  • Genesis child theme’s can be customized with code.
• You can use actions, hooks and filters to edit items in your site.
  • A hook is a piece of code that extends functionality of genesis or wordpress.
  • Actions are triggered by a specific events that take place in WordPress
  • Filters are functions that WordPress passes data through at certain points in execution.
• Code Snippets
  • Code snippets allow you to add small bits of code that add functionality.
  • They can be found here: http://my.studiopress.com/snippets/
• There are two ways you can build on to genesis
  • You can build a child theme from scratch.
    • Pros:
      • Totally unique and custom to you or your users needs
      • You can make a boilerplate theme to be used on other projects
    • Con
      • steeper learning curve and dev time
  • You can also Modify an existing child theme
    • Pros:
      • Main layout is in place. You just tweak CSS and preferences.
    • Con:
      • When doing many sites, make sure they all don’t start looking the same.
• Questions
  • If a theme hasn’t been updated in a while is it safe to use those child themes?
    • You should be fine. The child theme’s aren’t actually updated since the parent theme is a framework the child theme won’t actually need to be updated.
  • Do you have to know to code to work with the frameworks?
    • It really depends on what you want to do. With a bit of research you can do some basic changes. If you want to completely change the functionality of the theme.