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I apologize for not having acknowledged receipt of your answer earlier.

Many thanks for your answer and for this very useful information. I would not have been able to find it by myself. I will test it soon, when I do the next reindexing of the website: I assume that it will work fine, and otherwise I will let you know.

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Thank you very much for your answer.

No, I did not want to update the child theme, I know that it shouldn't be. My question was about updating Genesis Framework theme, not a child theme.

Anyway, I have come across an interesting plugin that can be used not for force checking but at least for updating a theme or plugin that does not want to update. It is called Update Theme and Plugins from Zip File (by Jeff Sherk), and it allows to update a theme or plugin already installed and to avoid the "destination already exists" error message. Thus I have been able to update Genesis 2.5 to Genesis 2.8 in a matter of seconds, although the update option was not available in my admin panel. I thought that it might be useful to share that info.

Yes, I am fully aware of the risks involved in adopting ClassicPress, especially for somebody like myself who uses Genesis for most websites. And the same is valid for plugins too, obviously. Right now, I have switched three (small) sites to ClassicPress, while I keep all my other sites on WP 4.9.9. I am waiting to see how things develop before making major decisions about the future for my larger sites, although I do definitely incline to embrace ClassicPress. The only thinh that I know is that I do not want to follow the Gutenberg path.

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Thanks, Codable! Glad to know that I am not alone among Genesis framework users.

By the way, I have received an answer from WP Engine support to my two questions:

1) "No, Genesis does not prevent updates on a WP fork."
2) "Genesis is a WordPress framework and is guaranteed to work with WordPress installations. Also, we haven't haven't received reports of incompatibility with ClassicPress."

I suppose that much will depend on the demand. If many average WP users get upset when they discover the new world of Gutenberg, this might create a sufficient demand for theme creators and plugin developers - provided those average users become aware of the existence of ClassicPress, obviously, which would require major hosting companies pointing to that option, something which is far from sure.

I agree that it won't be easy for ClassicPress. Your advice is reasonable. The hosting company where I have most of my sites recommends, for the time being, to activate the Classic Editor (which I have done, in addition to the Disable Gutenberg plugin) - and told me that they might offer ClassicPress support if there is a demand for it.

Let's see. I guess that the topic might emerge again on this forum in a few weeks or months.

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WP management has stated that they intend to keep the Classic option only for transition period, and support for the Classic Editor might end in December 2012:
http://gutenberghub.com/the-classic-editor-plugin-supported-until-december-31-2021/
I do not know what will happen to the Classic block in Gutenberg then. And what I like is really the Classic Editor, not a Classic block within Gutenberg.

This is definitely not satisfactory. If the Classic Editor would be kept and improved indefinitely, I would not have such concerns. In fact, I am so much concerned about the future that I am not sure that I will be using WP for future projects, and I have started exploring other CMS. A real pity, since I enjoy WP very much. But Gutenberg is just not what I want and need for writing my content.

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Thank you, Victor. You are right, and this is why I am asking the question. I am very pleased with WP until now, but I do not like Gutenberg at all for editing and publishing content for the type of sites I am in charge of (it will work for some, but not for some other ones), and I am aware that WP support for the Classic Editor probably won't go further than late 2021 or early 2022, i.e. a quite near future.
For those reasons, I am looking for other options, but I have exactly the concern that you have expressed: that at some point plugins and themes would stop working properly on a fork.
Some developers are committing themselves to support ClassicPress, since a number of them are not pleased with Gutenberg, but obviously it is not clear at this point how many of them will.
Anyway, I have sent the question to support, and I am waiting to hear from them.

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Thank you very much for your answer.

I will indeed contact support directly, as you had suggested.

I contacted support a few times in the past, but each time they advised me to go to the forum and said they couldn't help - hence my first reaction was to use the forum. But you are right, if there is one question for support, it is definitely that one.

I had also hoped that my post would encourage other users to share their own experiences and expectations.

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I have been testing each new version of Gutenberg on a mock website for the past ten months. It has not convinced me. I see what it brings and how it will be an exciting step for some websites. Moreover, the editor looks more modern. But my websites are heavily text-oriented, and the logic of blocks just does not work for most of them. If I had known about Gutenberg coming when I opted for WordPress as the new CMS for my websites three years ago, I would have selected another CMS.

Now, I am very pleased with WordPress, but very concerned about the future. I know that Genesis has made everything Gutenberg-ready, and I am grateful for that. But I feel that Gutenberg as an editor shouldn't be part of the core (although I can understand why it is made this way). For most of my sites, I will need to continue to work with the Classic Editor. I have installed the plugins Disable Gutenberg and Classic Editor on my sites. But WP seems to intend to keep the Classic Editor option only for a few years.

For this reason, I have been looking at the attempt by some people to fork WP and to launch Classic Press, now in beta. I will test it. It seems to offer an attractive option. But I am wondering, on the other hand, if Genesis will work with Classic Press in the long run? (I have used Genesis for all my sites.) It would be useful to know.

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Just to share the end of the story: the culprit was the Easy Genesis Pro plugin. It had been installed, activated, but - without me noticing - it did not appear in settings, and its settings were actually not accessible ("unable to load" message when I finally attempted to access them from the plugin list, after figuring out what the prefix "egwp_" could mean). Thus the plugin had created settings that I could not see anywhere and I had no access to.
Of course, I have shared that information with the developer.

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Victory! After many hours of search, I have achieved what I wanted-by inserting in the CSS the following simple code:

.egwp_featured_image {
    display: none;
}

I assume that I should still add before some information telling specifically that the featured image should not appear on individual pages and posts, but show on archive lists, list of recent articles, etc. Any suggestion about the proper code for adding that would be appreciated.

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I have attempted to deactivate those widgets that are not essential for the proper functioning of my site, and that I do not use on other sites: to no avail. The only specificity of this site, compared with other sites, is that it uses Polylang. I do not think that it can have an impact, but I mention it nevertheless.

Maybe I should deactivate all plugins in order to see if it changes something. But I cannot do that on a live site that was just redesigned and currently gets up to 1,000 visitors a day. I should probably create a clone in staging status, and experiment there.

But did anybody already experience such issues with featured images, and found the source of the issue?

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(For some reason, my topic does not seem to show in the list, thus I repeat my question below. The moderator is welcome to erase this in case it is redundant.)

Hello,

I had recently posted a question about a website that was not yet live: it is live now, and I am pleased with the result, using Lifestyle Pro. The website is a complete redesign and update of a website originally built with Dreamweaver in 2003, and having kept the same design since. No need to say visitors are impressed by the change: the wonder that it WordPress with Genesis themes!

Anyway, while I have solved all the issues that I encountered while building the site, I am now facing a perplexing problem that I have never encountered before on other sites that I built with WordPress and Genesis. The issue is that, if I select a featured image either for an article or for a page, that image automatically gets repeated at the top of the page, between the header and the article.

I had never seen such a behaviour. It happens on any type of post or page that includes a featured image. The issue disappears as soon as no featured image is selected any longer.

I have unselected all featured images, except for one in order to allow fellow users to see the issue on the included URL.
Sample page

I assume that the issue is theme-related, otherwise I would have already encountered it on other websites on which I am using Genesis themes. I have sites built with Magazine Pro, Daily Dish Pro, Metro Pro, Modern Studio Pro, News Pro, as well as third-party themes: never had such an issue.

I cannot think of any setting that I have activated and that could cause that issue.

Of course, I could just give up featured images, but it would be a limitation for further developments of that project.

I thank you in advance for any advice someone might have.

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I have now been able to reach exactly what I wanted to: by using the well-maintained plugin Spacer (https://wordpress.org/plugins/spacer/). It works perfectly.

Of course, I have been careful to check in multiple browsers. Strangely, the space was fine (without Spacer, but with the border-bottom having vanished) in the little-known browser Brave. But it didn't work in most browser (Safari, Chrome, Firefox, IE, etc.). Still, I have been careful to insert a small space, in order not to create havoc in case the behavior of other browsers changes some day. Any way, since each instance is generated by a shortcode plus CSS, I can at any time easily adjust to changes that might take place.

I was pretty confident that there would be a plugin doing the trick! But it took me time to find it. I hope that it can be useful to other users as well!

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I had not posted a link because it is in staging and I do not want search engines to spider it (it is a rebuilding of a former, non-WP site). If there is no risk of that happening, kindly let me know.

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Many thanks for this useful information - and for drawing my attention to the need to close the second brace! Much appreciated!

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Thank you for coming back to me.

You are absolutely right: there was an issue with a converted character that I had not noticed. Sorry for the trouble, next time I will carefully compare the code I insert with the code that has been sent to me!

Your trick works fine, the page will look exactly as I want it to.

I thank you very much for your kind help, this is much appreciated. I had played with other themes, but this is really the one matching my blog best, thus I am very happy to be able to use it.

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Thank you very much for your kindness in answering my question.

The only problem is that, when I add the suggested code to functions.php and then attempt to access the test site, I just get a blank page. Same when I attempt to access the WP control panel. As soon as I remove that piece of code, everything is back to normal.

Thus it seems that the code disrupts something crucial?

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From the various browsers I have tested, it seems to be working fine only with Firefox.

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Thank you very much, Susan. I am now exploring that, and maybe one just needs to admit that, while WP is a wonderful CMS, it has also some limitations. I could probably reach the trick by creating categories looking like subcategories, although they would actually be "flat" categories, all at the same level, e.g. having titles such as:
Category > Subcategroy
Category > Subcategroy > Sub-subcategory

It remains to be seen how the import would work.

Thank you also for the URL of Genesis Slack Group.

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FYI, your intuition was right: it had something to do with translations!

While the theme is not translated, I had the plugin Genesis Translations active. As soon as I deactivated it, the error message disappeared.

I have it active on other websites in French using a theme that is not translated (hoping that it will be useful with a future update some day), without experiecing such issues. However, I realize that it is probably wise to deactivate it on those sites too, since it is useless anyway at this point.

Thank you for having pointed to the possible issue. This was very helpful.

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Well, as you rightly remark, this is partly a matter of taste.

Beside taste, however, I think we should first pay attention to the kind of website we are runnning.

If you are running a website meant to have merely a few pages, maybe with an update/addition once in a while (e.g. a few times a year), then your preferred solution (wirthout the date) looks reasonable: you do not want to make too obvious visitors that your last update was a year ago.

On the other hand, if it is really a blog, with frequent updates (let's say at least once a month on average), then providing the date makes sense, Generally, for blogs or news websites, it is a good idea to make it possible for visitors to know from the URL when an article was published (although the date would usually also be found in the content for posts).

From SEO perspective, I do not know if it matters or not - maybe other, more qualified participants will want to comment about that.

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