[Summer]

Unless they changed something recently that I missed, there isn't a paid version of Ninja Forms.

I think it's set up the same way as Easy Digital Downloads, where the core plugin is free, but the add-ons come either individually priced or bundled. And no, I haven't seen any coupon codes for any Ninja Forms offered bundles, and I don't know if any of the affiliates links are discounted or not.

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WordPress / Genesis Site Design & Troubleshooting: A Touch of Summer | @SummerWebDesign
Slice of SciFi | Writers, After Dark

[Summer]

Alas, with their release of Marketpress 3.0 last year, WPMU not only didn't include the Genesis fixes they'd come up with for one of my sites, the upgrade broke quite a large number of non-Genesis installations and many stayed broken for months because their point update fixes didn't quite fix everything.

Since the sites I was using Marketpress on were only in catalog mode, I decided it would be easier for me to convert the products to CPTs, even using the same structure; didn't have to change a thing or add any redirects.

Short version of a long story: I've completely dropped WPMU Dev as a result, removed / replaced plugins, canceled membership, the whole works.

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WordPress / Genesis Site Design & Troubleshooting: A Touch of Summer | @SummerWebDesign
Slice of SciFi | Writers, After Dark

[Summer]

FWIW, to me it looks like GTMetrix is using a viewport size smaller than what your default size is, so it's viewing the images as scaled, which is what they are supposed to do in a mobile responsive setting.

So no, I would not resize the images... if the widget sees the image sizes, they are already defined in functions; If you resize the images, someone viewing the site on a smaller window will still see a scaled version of that smaller image.

GTMetrix might need to update their testing to account for mobile responsive sites, and adjust their testing viewports accordingly.

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WordPress / Genesis Site Design & Troubleshooting: A Touch of Summer | @SummerWebDesign
Slice of SciFi | Writers, After Dark

[Summer]

From what I understand, the Genesis licenses aren't fully transferable either. I had always allowed clients to use my Genesis license if they are on a maintenance plan with me, since me upgrading things when necessary is part of that plan.

But if it's a one-off deal, or they want to end the agreement, I make sure they know they need to purchase their own copies of Genesis and whichever child theme they have for their own usage. I insist upon it, because it's the right thing to do if they want to keep their versions of Genesis up-to-date.

I also don't want them screaming later that it's my fault if the site breaks when a WordPress update breaks an old Genesis installation. Sometimes you can't argue with folks who just don't understand how this stuff works... which is why they hired you in the first place :/

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WordPress / Genesis Site Design & Troubleshooting: A Touch of Summer | @SummerWebDesign
Slice of SciFi | Writers, After Dark

[Summer]

I had the same question. SP support said that the theme had been pulled, but links from the theme dev's site should refer back to purchase links here. I didn't find anything there except for demo links and support links.

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WordPress / Genesis Site Design & Troubleshooting: A Touch of Summer | @SummerWebDesign
Slice of SciFi | Writers, After Dark

[Summer]

@Dev, I did vote with my money, deciding not to purchase or use items from WPMU Dev or Woo any more. And I've been in the computer game almost as long as you have, and I started out with Unix (AT&T, DEC and HP) during those early days.

So my question for you is: if StudioPress' user base expands which increases demands on the official support channels, but they have no matching increase in revenues to fund expanded hours or support staff, how long do you think it would be before a drop in quality support or worse, quality products, affected how many new customers come on board? Would they be able to stay in business with poor quality products and support that became less and less responsive as time went by?

Many of us already pay yearly fees to Gravity Forms, some to Yoast, and some to a host of other theme developers for frameworks other than Genesis. So, you are free to move your clients to a different framework, no one is stopping you or trying to talk you out of doing that. But I think you'll find that eventually, some of those other frameworks will cost you as much or more going forward, for all of the same reasons.

As for the inconsistency of communication, all I can say is that historically, SP has never been very good at that, and I merely assumed that everyone received the same emails I had... in fact, I usually get double emails for SP news, new SP releases, Copyblogger webinars and more, typically one from SP, and one from Copyblogger (as a consequence of having purchased Premise oh so looooong ago).

I had expected the new pricing structure to be posted on Jan 1, but I guess we'll find out on Monday, Jan 4? Hopefully? The price changes do affect those clients who want to purchase their own single-theme licenses, so knowing what to tell them to expect going forward would be helpful for me.

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WordPress / Genesis Site Design & Troubleshooting: A Touch of Summer | @SummerWebDesign
Slice of SciFi | Writers, After Dark

[Summer]

I'm confused about what you're complaining about. There are so many developers that have yearly fees for premium themes and plugins, and have had them for years... this isn't something that came about in 2015, more like 2007.

Yearly pricing for support and updates has been a thing for a long time. At least StudioPress isn't pulling a bait and switch with those fees like Woo did with WooCommerce back in 2012. That was a heinous gear shift you would have been right to get your back up about... this change, not so much.

As for how it's good for you, you keep getting official support and updates for your themes, as well as new themes, and they stay in business to be able to provide those services to you.

If someone who's only purchased a single theme in the past needs support or an update, they can pay for a single year's support for just that theme, or else not. That's the way other Geneis shops have handled those needs, so I would be surprised if SP doesn't do the same thing. The only difference I see here is that SP heavily promoted the Pro Plus sale because it provides the largest value for end users, which I'm guessing has you assuming that for future updates, people have to buy the entire kit and kaboodle or be left out in the cold?

I'd be willing to bet that's not the case... plus, their new package deal fees are still cheaper than what you'd pay to Woo or WPMU Dev these days.

http://my.studiopress.com/pro-plus/ (the link currently available from the Shop for Themes page)

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WordPress / Genesis Site Design & Troubleshooting: A Touch of Summer | @SummerWebDesign
Slice of SciFi | Writers, After Dark

[Summer]

According to the email offer that was initially sent out last August, what Susan says is correct.

It does refer to the Pro Plus offer link that doesn't seem to work anymore now that the offer is over, but the email says:

With the Pro Plus Pack, you get all of the following for a single, one-time payment:
The Genesis Framework

All 37 of our StudioPress child themes

31 bonus themes

Copyblogger’s standard 30-day money-back guarantee


You also get:
World-class customer and community support as long as you’re a customer

Every child theme design we make in the future

Everything. It’s all included. You never pay again.

This was the email for the deal that ended at the end of August, my guess is the end of the year deal was similar, just at a higher cost than the end of August deal (and a handful of new themes have been released since then).

So as long as you were a Pro Plus member before Dec 31, you'll be taken care of. A handful of other Genesis theme shops have had sales over the past several years, allowing people one last shot to get into lifetime deals before they changed the pricing structures (I got onboard the last one Themedy had a couple years ago), and as long as they all continue to honor that, if changing a pricing structure means these shops stay in business and continue providing support and quality products, I don't have a problem with that.

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WordPress / Genesis Site Design & Troubleshooting: A Touch of Summer | @SummerWebDesign
Slice of SciFi | Writers, After Dark

[Summer]

The default text widget is a WordPress thing, not a Genesis thing, and it's plain text by design, so you may have to send your complaints about that to the WordPress core development team instead of here 🙂

From https://codex.wordpress.org/WordPress_Widgets

The Text Widget is one of the most commonly used WordPress Widgets that comes with every WordPress installation. It allows users to add text, video, images, custom lists, and more to their WordPress sites.

It has never had a rich text editor like for posts and pages.

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WordPress / Genesis Site Design & Troubleshooting: A Touch of Summer | @SummerWebDesign
Slice of SciFi | Writers, After Dark

[Summer]

Jeffrey,

there are a couple of plugins that add the rich text editor to widgets for content editing, so check out and play with a few, see which one you like best.

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WordPress / Genesis Site Design & Troubleshooting: A Touch of Summer | @SummerWebDesign
Slice of SciFi | Writers, After Dark

[Summer]

For Genesis framework themes, it's your call.

The child themes are rarely updated -- you can see that from the dates in the theme downloads section, and they won't ever auto-update on you. Updating the framework will not affect your child theme customizations, unless you've gone and made changes in the main genesis folder too (which is a bad practice to engage in anyway) 🙂

If you see that a child theme has been updated, and those changes incorporate things you'd like to add, I usually just copy in the CSS changes manually and upload the fresh versions of anything in lib or includes or js folders of the child theme only.

Since the themes are so relatively small, I just download a copy of the customized child theme folder (if it's not already stashed there to begin with), that way if I goof something really bad, I can start over.

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WordPress / Genesis Site Design & Troubleshooting: A Touch of Summer | @SummerWebDesign
Slice of SciFi | Writers, After Dark

[Summer]

@Abland, thanks!

Found what I was looking for; seems like 2.2.4 included a fix for a Genesis settings screen issue for WP 4.4, which is the explanation I'd been looking for.

For my sites so far, that same fix makes the settings screen look strange in all versions of WP, including 4.4, 4.3.1 and 4.2.5, but since no one else seems to have mentioned it, I guess it's just an admin design choice update I hate that's bugging me 🙂

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WordPress / Genesis Site Design & Troubleshooting: A Touch of Summer | @SummerWebDesign
Slice of SciFi | Writers, After Dark

[Summer]

Personally, I've been waiting for the list of updates in 2.2.4 and 2.2.5 to appear on genesischangelog.com. I'm curious about those few major changes that were made in the Genesis admin display, and there's no place else I know of to start looking for that info.

This is one thing I've always wondered about, why the changelog isn't included in the actual files of the framework. Plugins have them, themes from other shops and other Genesis child theme shops have them, even themes in the repository and Theme Forest have them... why doesn't the framework have them included?

That said, Raven, you're good with updating, if you've done what Victor outlined 🙂

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WordPress / Genesis Site Design & Troubleshooting: A Touch of Summer | @SummerWebDesign
Slice of SciFi | Writers, After Dark

[Summer]

"While all answers are responses, not all responses are answers." 🙂

Initially, the presence of the gradient was also new information to the support staff, but since making changes to what I was asking about counts as design changes, it's not something they would provide a code solution for. It's something I will have to tweak myself to get the effect I do or don't want. I have an idea of what to play with in the CSS, though.

Since that's fairly low priority compared to the rest of the information that the client needs added to the site (as in, that effect is invisible and non-essential compared to other things I'm putting together for the final site), it's not even on the back burner at the moment.

I'll set the thread to resolved for now, and perhaps post a fix later, but it's one of those tiny things that bugs me... why have that feature in there if you can't even see it unless you're like me and trip over it by accident, think it's cool, and want it to actually work? 🙂

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WordPress / Genesis Site Design & Troubleshooting: A Touch of Summer | @SummerWebDesign
Slice of SciFi | Writers, After Dark

[Summer]

Yep, using the same functions.

What version of Genesis are you using, and what versions of Co-Authors Plus and Genesis Co-Authors Plus are you using?

I've got Genesis 2.2.3, Co-Authors Plus 3.1.1, Genesis Co-Authors Plus 1.3 (with some custom code added for handling guest author profiles that aren't WP users), and Genesis Sandbox Featured Content Widget 1.1.8. I even have it running on a site still using Genesis 2.1.3, behaving normally.

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WordPress / Genesis Site Design & Troubleshooting: A Touch of Summer | @SummerWebDesign
Slice of SciFi | Writers, After Dark

[Summer]

I believe either of the enhanced Genesis Featured Posts widgets allows you to select image placement either before or after the title, along with image alignment.

I think the Genesis Sandbox Featured Content Widget is the one that's most up to date? I'm using it on a couple of sites (but a different one on a couple others), and you can select to place the title above or below the image.

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WordPress / Genesis Site Design & Troubleshooting: A Touch of Summer | @SummerWebDesign
Slice of SciFi | Writers, After Dark

[Summer]

And you also switched to the Genesis Sandbox Featured Content widget? Amd you updated the shortcode in the widget to use the [post_authors_post_link] too?

I know that handles multiple authors, because I'm using it and it displays multiple authors (I added myself to one movie review just to test, and it worked, showing both names).

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WordPress / Genesis Site Design & Troubleshooting: A Touch of Summer | @SummerWebDesign
Slice of SciFi | Writers, After Dark

[Summer]

Did you add the extra code to your functions.php as well?

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WordPress / Genesis Site Design & Troubleshooting: A Touch of Summer | @SummerWebDesign
Slice of SciFi | Writers, After Dark

[Summer]

The default Genesis Featured Posts isn't that smart, for use with Co-Authors.

I use the Genesis Sandbox Featured Content Widget to get multiple authors displayed in widget use.

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WordPress / Genesis Site Design & Troubleshooting: A Touch of Summer | @SummerWebDesign
Slice of SciFi | Writers, After Dark

[Summer]

I left Hostgator earlier this year, after almost 2 years of declining service, and moved over to Site 5. Absolutely loving it so far.

From what I recall, Dreamhost had improved, but Bluehost hadn't.

I had tried Siteground last year with my most massive site (mainly because of so many recommendations from other WP pros), but they could never get my site working over there, no matter how many times I upgraded to a bigger and bigger hosting package. I finally punted, but not before wasting a few hundred bucks and a couple of months on them.

I also still have a bunch of sites on Media Temple (from long before GoDaddy bought them out). The hosting package I have you can't buy from them anymore (at least not with the same higher levels of resources), so ymmv.

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WordPress / Genesis Site Design & Troubleshooting: A Touch of Summer | @SummerWebDesign
Slice of SciFi | Writers, After Dark

[Author]

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