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I understand that studiopress themes are child themes of genesis, but does that mean they never get updated? Is it that only genesis and wordpress will ever need updating, so we don't meed to be concerned with changing the style.css in the theme folder? Is it necessary to create a custom.css for changes, or ust make changes to style.css?
It would be a good idea to make a custom.css and @import it - or to add your customizations at the bottom of the style sheet in case you ever did want to update a child theme.
(This would make you a Better Person than I - I'm just not that disciplined, and I make my changes right in the stylesheet. I justify that by thinking my changes are so extensive I'm making a whole new child theme - the result is usually unrecognizable as whatever theme or combination of themes they started out as. Still, I should probably be making my changes easier to find; as your mother said, "Do as I say, not as I do.")
For example, Modern Portfolio just got updated to Pro without the look changing, but now the markup is html5.
Other themes that were updated to be responsive in the last year or so have also gotten updates to Pro - News, Magazine and more - but their looks changed enough that to me they became new themes, so when I use them, it'll be on new sites.
Hope this helps.
MB
Sharing the good news about the wonders of modern CSS and the split-step. Either one should get you moving fast. 😀
To expand a little on the previous response, when a Genesis child theme is updated, it is considered a whole different child theme. So if you are using an older version, you don't need to update unless you want to redo your site. You will never be prompted to update the child theme in your dashboard - only the framework. So feel free to make all the changes you want within your stylesheet. 🙂
Andrea Whitmer, Owner/Developer, Nuts and Bolts Media
I provide development and training services for designers • Find me on Twitter and Google+I use to add the custom code at the end of the style sheet when i first started because it was easier to find the changes i had made but now i just modify the default code because its more efficient.
Thanks for the feedback, I too just alter the code, but want to feel like I am also using "best practices". I have the Genesis Extender which does the css on the front-end, and creates a custom.css in another folder, and sometimes for small changes I will use that, but ftp and style.css are my main change agents!
Are we sure the editing a Genesis child theme is best practice? It just seems odd that this is the workflow rather than using a plugin such as the Genesis Extender or the Jetpack Custom CSS module.
I just want to double check this is accurate. Then if your docs are open source, I'd love to make an edit to them to include this. 🙂
No one ever said it was a best practice - the "best" practice would be to create a separate stylesheet and separate functions file and enqueue both. But since there is no danger of the files being overwritten, it seems a little pointless to go through all that headache when you can just edit the theme directly. I can tell you with 100% certainty that the child themes will never, ever prompt you to update in your WP dashboard.
Think of it this way - if you were using a plain old WP theme, where would you make your edits? In a child theme, because it's safe from updates to the parent. Since Genesis is already handing you a child theme with much of the work done for you (and all the functionality contained in the framework, making your child theme files safe from framework updates), it makes sense to adjust within the child files as you see fit. Similarly, when I build a custom child theme, I create the files directly and would expect any changes to take place there as well. For my workflow, it's more a matter of cutting out unnecessary steps.
Andrea Whitmer, Owner/Developer, Nuts and Bolts Media
I provide development and training services for designers • Find me on Twitter and Google+Maybe another concern is losing control over where changes have been made, in the event you need to return part of the code to the original. I'm an amateur; no knowledge of best practices. But I've been commenting my CSS changes using my initials--so I can quickly do a browser Find on my initials and come to every place where I made a change. I've also used Filezilla to download the CSS file to my desktop and save it as a dated archive.
I suppose the option--in the event that I mess things up thoroughly--is to reload the original child theme (like Executive Pro, which I'm using) and then go back and add my modifications. Using my archived CSS file, I have an easier time seeing what I had done previously.
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