I build custom Genesis child themes for most of my clients. Rather than starting from an existing StudioPress theme, I use my own starter theme: EA Genesis Child.
What is a starter theme
A starter theme is a base upon which you can build your own custom theme. They usually have minimal styling and contain the features and functionality you use on every site you build.
I recommend you check out StudioPress’ starter theme, Genesis Sample, in addition to mine. After you’ve built a few Genesis sites you’ll likely build your own starter theme structured to your liking.
My starter theme includes
SASS for Styling
Rather than one long stylesheet, my styles are broken into smaller SASS partials for a cleaner organization. I also use variables for key settings (colors, column widths), mixins for helper functions, and dynamically generate styles.
Gutenberg Ready
The theme includes theme support for new Gutenberg features. It also compiles a separate stylesheet so the editor matches the frontend display.
Accessible
Genesis can be made more accessible by enabling the accessibility features.
Template partials for archive pages
See this article for more information.
Login Logo
The site login form displays the client’s logo (example)
Miscellaneous performance improvements
Like minimizing classes on nav menus and posts and removing avatars from comments.
Jumedeen khan says
Awesome theme,
I see many new features but I think you missed one important features.
As we all know, every wordpress site have related posts but genesis framework have not.
If you add “Related Posts” then no need additional code to show related posts.
I’m sure this is required feature for wp themes, please add this features.
Bill Erickson says
On every site I build, both the design and functionality of the Related Posts section is unique, so it doesn’t make sense to build it into the starter themes. I’d have to rebuild it every time anyway.
But here’s a start. Create a single.php file in your theme with the following in it:
– For EA-Starter: https://gist.github.com/billerickson/cbed55d31f697b0d9375ad8ff6b54b94
– For EA-Genesis-Child: https://gist.github.com/billerickson/6bfe300ba9c5a0d4a5ae910e6d54b135
Vishal Sonune says
Incredible child theme with responsive and excellent features. Thanks for your valuable work.
I have found a little bug in this theme.
(1) when you’ll visit homepage it’s reload smoothly, but on post page, it’s not loading smoothly, cause its flickering before loading webpage. Also site-title or site-area padding and font get changed automatically.
If this possible please fix this bug.
Also I want to add avatar in comment.
Thanks
Bill Erickson says
What you’re describing is the “Critical CSS” feature. Only the critical CSS is loaded in the document head (style guide and site header styles) and the rest is loaded in the document footer.
You can disable this by changing
true
tofalse
on this line.Vishal Sonune says
Thanks for your instant support.❤👍
Describe one thing more please.
I want to show User avatar in comment section.
I’ll grateful to you.
Bill Erickson says
Remove this code from inc/wordpress-cleanup.php
Vishal Sonune says
Thanks again for your response.
❤
Jack says
How to enable primary sidebar on homepage.
Bill Erickson says
This theme is hardcoded to use full width layout on archive pages. You can disable this by removing this line from archive.php.
You also might want to remove this line so you can customize the archive layout using Genesis settings.