[cdils]

Hey Beezel,

Think of registering the widget area as "part 1" and telling the widget area where to display as "part 2". Part 3 is styling. 🙂

So, yes, you are not limited to displaying widget areas in the sidebar. Here's a tut that shows that:

http://www.carriedils.com/after-entry-widget/

Cheers,
Carrie

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[cdils]

If you're using the Genesis Simple Sidebars plugin, there's no slick way to give each sidebar unique styling as the the markup surrounding the widget area never changes.

You could use any CSS selectors from a post to target the sidebar, for example:

.post .sidebar-primary { .... }

.custom-body-class .sidebar-primary { ... }

But that's really not ideal as that can easily get out of hand depending on how many custom sidebars you have.

If you're comfortable registering those sidebars (a.k.a. widget areas) directly via code, you can mark them up with any selectors you wish.

http://my.studiopress.com/tutorials/register-widget-area/

Cheers,
Carrie

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[cdils]

Check out the DailyBolt - it's an aggregate of 20+ Genesis/WordPress blogs that's great.

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[cdils]

Hi Kristie,

On your CSS for .title-area, the background image is set to "no-repeat". Change it to "repeat-x" and it'll go the width of the container.

If you want the blue lines stretched fully then you'll need to add this css:

.site-header .wrap {
    max-width: 100%;
}

Currently your .wrap is set at max-width: 1140px. The more specific CSS I suggested above will override that.

Cheers,
Carrie

p.s. When you responded to your original post, it moved this out of the "unanswered posts" section. That's where moderators keep tabs to see if there are unanswered posts hanging around.

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[cdils]

if ( ! is_singular( 'post' ) )
		return; 

if (  is_singular( 'post' ) )
		{ }

The first statement says, "if it's not a single post", exit the function, otherwise carry on. The second statement says the opposite, "if it IS a single post" then do something..." The first statement is preferred because it exits the function immediately without reading further. In the second funtion, if it doesn't match the first conditional, it'll execute through the remainder of the function to see if there's anything else it needs to do.

Regarding use of the curly braces... both statements are semantically, however in order to standardize usage, Nacin suggested in 2013 to always use braces. Not a big deal, just the direction that WordPress chose to standardize.

Onto the thumbnail...

You're correct that both ways accomplish basically the same thing, but what I like about the Genesis way is:

* The genesis_get_image() encapsulates both the has_post_thumbnail conditional check (which the other code example should have to prevent that html markup printing in the event of no thumbnail. You can get the same output with less code.

Also:

* I (personally) prefer not to escape PHP (end curly bracket) and go back to HTML for such a small a small amount of HTML. The Genesis version is more readable. Of course, you could refactor the second code example to do that, so that's not a Genesis thing, just a coding preference

The Sidebar:

Using genesis_widget_area() nets you the advantage of including contextual HTML5 markup around the widget (assuming your site supports HTML5), so no need to manually write out those divs with hard-coded classes.

Good questions. Hope that helps.

Carrie

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[cdils]

Hi @cosmocanuck,

First, I don't think Genesis is a "superior" form of theme development over the "by hand" method you've described using yourself. You could build a light-weight, well-coded, fully-functional theme by hand that does just as much as Genesis.

For me, the beauty of using a framework like Genesis is that it gives you a head start to building a great theme. You can start with a bare-bones stylesheet and functions.php that invokes the framework in under five minutes. If you're using _s or Bootstrap, or another framework, you could achieve a similar head start - the point is to start with a solid code base and develop on top of that (whether you created that code base or someone else did).

All that to say, I don't think Genesis is the right/only way and everything else is wrong - I think it just depends on the needs of the developer. Yes, you can customize the heck out of Genesis without ever leaving functions.php. Yes, you can even further extend Genesis using the WordPress templating system as you pointed out. The choice to create a template versus just dumping all of those customizations in functions.php boils down mostly to the organization of code (developer preference).

As my comfort level using action hooks/filters has increased, so has my ability to squeeze more out of Genesis. Going back to that initial code base, there are so many great things there that it'd take me a long time to build myself (and I wouldn't do nearly as a good a job). So, I stay with Genesis partly due to my comfort level with the framework and partly due to the code quality.

Beyond all that, I love working with Genesis because of the vibrant, helpful, and passionate community around it. You mentioned tutorials - there's no shortage of them. People love working with Genesis and are vocal in their commitment to sharing their knowledge. In addition to that, Genesis contributors are actively engaged participants in the larger WordPress community and contributing at that level as well. They're not in a bubble, but rather trying to make sure Genesis does things "the WordPress way."

If I sound biased, it's because I am. At the end of the day, choose to work with a platform that 1) you enjoy and 2) helps you get your work done better/faster. If that's not Genesis, that's okay, but I'm hoping this sheds some light on your question about why folks choose it. 🙂

Cheers,
Carrie

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[cdils]

Hi there,

You'll need to open up functions.php in a text editor and around line 202, change:

return '<a class="more-link" href="' . get_permalink() . '"> View Listing </a>';

to

return '<a class="more-link" href="' . get_permalink() . '"> View Project </a>';

If you're new to editing WordPress files, I'd encourage you to take a peek at this tutorial first.

Cheers,
Carrie

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[cdils]

Hi there,
I just took a look at your site in all three browsers mentioned and the background looks okay to me. What's the specific issue you're having?

Cheers,
Carrie

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[cdils]

Hey Lynne,
Can you post the URL?

Cheers,
Carrie

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[cdils]

Hi there,

You could add a transparent background to this element where the first three number sets correspond to an RGB color value (white, in this example) and the .8 refers to the percent opacity (1 is solid, 0 is transparent):

.site-inner .wrap {
background-color: rgba(255,255,255,.8)
}

If you only wanted this on the home page and not other pages, just add .home at the beginning, like this:

.home .site-inner . wrap

Cheers,
Carrie

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[cdils]

Hi Krista,

You'd either need to remove it via the code above (to keep the author line from printing to the page) or hide it (with CSS). Is your hesitation working with code or editing a file directly? If it's the latter, you could use a plugin like Genesis Simple Hooks to insert your custom code.

Cheers,
Carrie

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[cdils]

Here's a great tutorial for adding a responsive menu into Genesis > http://wpbacon.com/tutorials/genesis-responsive-menu-2-0/

Cheers,
Carrie

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[cdils]

If you want to post a private reply with an admin login, I'll take a look.

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[cdils]

One more piece of advice that came in off of Twitter:

@cdils @andrea_r Also, Ron and Andrea’s Replicator plugin works great to make identical copies of sites to start from.

— Stéphane Bergeron (@pixelyzed) April 20, 2014

Try the Replicator plugin -> http://wpebooks.com/replicator/

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[cdils]

Hi Darren,

First, let me lower your expectations by telling you I'm no expert in Multisite or multi-lingual sites, BUT I've asked some experts to take a peek at your question and chime in.

For starters, the consensus from pros is to use Multisite, with unique sites for each language.

Generally speaking, it's probably easiest to set up one site in it's entirety and then duplicate it and translate it - that way you avoid repeating some of those basic setup options.

bbPress is great for forums.

A combination of a custom post type and gravity forms could be an ideal way to have users submit data from the front-end and then keep it in "draft" or "pending review" mode until it's been approved. That's *if* you want to eventually display that custom post type (the report or whatever) on the site. If you don't want to display it on the site and just need a method for sending in data and having it approved, you could probably eliminate the custom post type piece.

Cheers,
Carrie

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[cdils]

Hi,
Can you post a link to you're site? Much easier to troubleshoot that way. 🙂

Cheers,
Carrie

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[cdils]

These are the three scripts it recommends removing:

http://www.matteoduo.com/…S1L1cjPzAA.js.pagespeed.ce.Wmpbak3q_B.js
http://www.matteoduo.com/…5LRy83MAwA.js.pagespeed.ce.oKvfQx7EmC.js
http://www.matteoduo.com/…i7KLCgpBgA.js.pagespeed.ce.DWqlBA6zb6.js

Are those scripts you've installed on your site manually or through a plugin? They're not default Minimum scripts. 🙂

I'm not a speed pro, but it looks like whatever you're using to minify/cache causes more slow down than it saves time.

Cheers,
Carrie

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[cdils]

Hi,

You can change the color of the text by finding this in your style.css file:

.ambiance-grid .entry-title a, 
.ambiance-grid .entry-title a:hover

and changing the color to whatever you want.

Easiest way to move the text below the image is to remove the absolute positioning from that element. Find this:

.ambiance-grid .entry-header

and change the position to static instead of absolute.

You'll want to play with the CSS a bit to get the effect you want, but that's the general idea.

Cheers,
Carrie

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[cdils]

Hm. I can't think of a simple way to do this off the top of my head. I think you'd have to create a custom archive template for the category page in question with a modified loop that excludes those posts on the home page. The question is how does that page know what posts are showing on the front page... You'd need to pass that info on to the archive page maybe via the querystring or something cleaner behind the scenes.

Sorry, that's not a very helpful answer. I guess I'd ask "how important is it?" since it's probably more than a simple code snippet to make it happen.

Or I could be overthinking it. 🙂

Cheers,
Carrie

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[cdils]

Hi there,

I just tried your code on a local install of Metric 1.0 and it worked fine.

You may have a plugin or some other customization in functions.php that is interfering. Have you added any other custom code to functions.php? If so, please share.

Otherwise, disable/re-active plugins one at a time until you find the conflict (Genesis Simple Edits is the first potential one that comes to mind, but not sure).

Cheers,
Carrie

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