What is the genesis community opinion on this

[mireille]

I have been using genesis extender to help me with code since I do not know what I am doing. However I was told by someone here that the code from it comes in after everything is loaded.

My questions to the community is : is it a bad thing to use such a plugin? Should we instead find code bits and pieces and paste them in the child theme. That sometimes works often does not. What is your opinion?

How many people in this community use plugins like extender? Does it make the site "bloated"?

Thank you for answering these so that I might learn something.

[marybaum]

I have no experience with the Genesis Extender.

Copying and pasting snippets can be a crapshoot. So many devs have put snippets out there over the years, for whatever versions of Genesis and WordPress were current at the time, that it really pays to look at the date when a given snippet was posted.

(And, just now, I went looking for a snippet in the Snippets section here and found the links gone ... I wonder if I just didn't let them load long enough, or if they're being updated, or ... or ...)

But there is an alternative I highly recommend: start knowing what you're doing. Sign up for Lynda.com or Codecademy or both, or any other resource you like, and start really learning PHP.

It can be a slog, but what many devs won't tell you is that writing code is hard for everyone, especially at first, and then occasionally afterward.

I certainly am no ninja. I've been at this coding thing about five years, since I turned 50, and as a designer/marketer by training I'm much more at home in CSS.

But I do think the first step is to shift your mindset just a little, from I-don't-know to I'm-learning-how.

And.

Until you feel ready to work with snippets you understand, whatever my experience is with a tool you like is irrelevant.

Use it if it works for you! If in two months or two years you see that it's bloating your code, you'll know how to fix it. And, until then, who's going to be looking at your sites' code? Your family or your staff? The owner of some shoe store who got your name from her cousin?

Nah. Until you land a university's computer-science department as a client, I wouldn't worry.

Enjoy the spring. Genesis is a great tool and a great community for ladies over 21 who want to build great stuff.

Mary

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Sharing the good news about the wonders of modern CSS and the split-step. Either one should get you moving fast. 😀

[MireilleG]

Great advice. Thanks again. You make great sense and I have been worrying too much about the little details. On to less kvetching and more work.

[CleanPageDom]

I'd second Mary's answer. I've been developing using Genesis for about two years and have gradually weened myself from "Oh, there must be a plugin for that", to "I'll just go and find something to copy into functions.php", to "Now, if I just change this add_action to this, then that should do what I want it to do".

By no means a true php coder, but a lot more confident to hunt out code and adapt to my needs. There is a wealth of stuff out there for Genesis. It really is well supported.

I've got a cheatsheet where I keep snippets of code that I use regularly - adapted to my needs. Things you do site-in, site-out soon become second nature.

Next step is to sign up to Lynda or similar and learn the stuff from scratch. Just don't have the time.

Good luck.

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