We’ve been using Genesis for a few years, mostly for our cost-conscious clients. It’s an amazingly powerful framework. Now that we’ve been living with Genesis for awhile, here’s our take on some pretty handy, dandy Genesis focused plugins.
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- Custom Footer
- This plugin adds a section to the Genesis Theme Settings page where users can enter HTML to output in the site footer in place of the default Genesis footer credits. You can use any of the existing Genesis footer shortcodes, your own HTML, or just simple text. This is a great, and simple plugin with a simple goal. If you want something a bit more robust, check out the Genesis Widgetized Footer plugin.
- eNews Extended
- Creates a new widget to easily add mailing lists to a Genesis website. Recommended plugin to replace the Genesis eNews Widget removed in Genesis 2.0. The widget allows the site administrator to set either the Feedburner ID or choose MailPoet’s lists or form action, e-mail form field and hidden fields to mimic the subscribe form of other mailing list services. Some of the services supported include aWeber, Constant Contact, MailChimp and Mail Poet.
- Extra Settings Transporter
- Finally, not only will this plugin perform backups or transfers of Genesis core settings but also hook in official & third-party plugins plus some child themes. Especially useful for developers to speed up their work! Currently 24 different plugins are supported and 58 different Genesis child themes with extra settings are supported.
- Featured Page Advanced
- This is one of my favorite Genesis plugins. It is like the normal Genesis Feature Page plugin, but this one’s on steroids. It lets you to add a custom image, custom content, page excerpt, and more. Adds custom image upload field, custom content field, option to display the page excerpt, and uses the same CSS classes as the original Genesis widget, so any styling you are currently using will be passed to this widget.
- Latest Tweets
- While this plugin was created by the StudioPress team for use with their Genesis framework, it works well with any WordPress theme. I like this over Alex King’s Twitter Tools because it just has more flexibility about what you show and there are plenty of CSS hooks so you can style its output to your heart’s content.
- Layout Extras
- This is helpful since it allows you to control on a page by page and post by post basis your page layouts. With this plugin, you can very easily modify the (registered) default layouts for homepage, singular pages (for posts and pages), various archive sections, author pages, attachment pages, search results pages, the 404 page, via a new theme options page. Just look for it at the submenu: Genesis > Layout Extras. The plugin optionally adds up to nine additional layouts. Also, you can optionally add Layouts meta box support for post types inpost screens which don’t have it yet. Plus, Genesis Archive Settings for post types could be enabled as well. As a smart bonus the plugin also includes the layout setting for the bbPress 2.x forum plugin which itself is compatible to Genesis. Also added is the layout setting for other plugins from the Genesis ecosystem or other third-party authors: for example AgentPress Listings which includes the custom post type ‘listings’ and the taxonomy “features.”
- Printstyle Plus
- This small and lightweight plugin adds a printer-ready stylesheet file (print.css/print-html5.css) for the Genesis Framework and its currently active child theme. Any unneeded site elements will be removed, such as main and sub navigation bar, sidebar, footer widgets, form input fields to name a few. This plugin requires the Genesis Framework to operate.
- Simple Hooks
- This plugin creates a new Genesis settings page that allows you to insert code (HTML, Shortcodes, and PHP), and attach it to any of the 50+ action hooks throughout the Genesis Theme Framework, from StudioPress. You don’t have to touch any template files. Instead of the sometimes tedious and unfamiliar process of creating functions in your theme files, this plugin gives you an attractive, easy to use interface for modifying your Genesis theme via the hook system. The plugin accepts HTML, Shortcodes, and PHP and gives you access to all 50+ hooks built into the Genesis theme, and a few built-in WordPress hooks as well.
- Simple Sidebars
- This plugin allows you to create multiple, dynamic widget areas, and assign those widget areas to sidebar locations within the Genesis Framework on a per post, per page, or per tag/category archive basis.
- NOTE While this is a powerful and useful plugin, this author has found that only one additional sidebar is supported and for some weird reason, the standard sidebar took on the behavior of the newly-created “blog sidebar” so I had to flip their functionality. So beware of that “gotcha.” Otherwise a very handy plugin.
- Widgetized Footer
- NOTE: Use either this plugin OR the Genesis Custom Footer plugin; but don’t use both of them. This one allows more control over where the footer info is placed and what kind of footer info you want. The Genesis Custom Footer plugin simply controls the “credits” and “copyright” info contained in the Genesis child theme’s footer area. This plugin lets you use up to two widget areas. These widgets can contain copyright information, site credits, text menuts, basically anything you want.
Joni Mueller has been designing web sites for hire since 2003, when she first blew up her web host’s server by insisting on running Greymatter. Since then, Joni has designed for Blogger and Movable Type, TextPattern, WordPress and CMS Made Simple. She lives with her cat and shoe collection in a bucolic old section of Houston called Idylwood. For some strange reason, Joni likes to refer to herself in the third person. When she’s not working on web design, she’s ordering lawyers around. And blogging about it. Or both.
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