Over the last three weeks I have been manically coding up a storm and developed six brand new themes, breathed new life into one and redeveloped a favourite. For all of these I made the conscious decision to embrace and commit to developing using the Genesis Theme Framework (affiliate link). Can I just say I’m glad I persisted?
It may surprise you to know that I had been a very loud naysayer of Genesis until my recent foray. All the reasons I had against it were:
- It seemed to have a reduced feature set than say WooThemes Canvas, which didn’t seem to justify the very large fan base
- You want me to pay for it? Why would I do that when Thematic and Underscores is free?
- It didn’t allow me to develop easily using Sass (compiled CSS) in the same way as Bones – and I just loved Bones
So I removed my bias and took a deep breath and made the plunge. There were some frustrations, a few choice words were muttered (or yelled) but there were also a lot of ah ha moments and by theme six (Blomst theme, which is pictured above) I was really in a Genesis development groove. Here’s why:
- That big fan base, well they are also a bunch of helpful individuals who are very good at sharing their own triumphs (and code)
- The cost (US$59.95) is a one off, which makes it cheaper that WooThemes Canvas. Buying it also gives you access to code snippets and documentation, which were so very useful
- Hooks and filters just seemed to make more sense and once I applied myself I achieved a lot. My greatest success was incorporating a masonry layout (kind of like Pinterest) on my Explore theme
My themes are available for sale in my revamped Etsy store (USD) and on my Crimson Pear web store (AUD). In the process I have retired a few themes and a couple of them are now available for free on my web store.
If you have any feedback, comments, suggestion or questions let me know. I’m off to start another theme.
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