Customizing Studio Press Child Themes

Q: I’ve just started a blog. I’m new at it. The blog is set up using the Genesis theme Lexicon. I would like tags to show under my posts, but for some reason they don’t. Maybe this particular theme doesn’t enable it. How can I address this? I am not a coder so is there a plugin or something easy I can do. Also, can you tell me how to add widget-isable footers to my blog, please? In the theme I use, there are no footer widgets.

Thanks in advance.

Regards,
Gary

Genesis StudioPress Themes

A: I am an affiliate for Genesis, and I really do love their themes! StudioPress, the providers of the Genesis Framework and child themes, has a great community of support with thorough documentation and tutorials:

• Genesis Tutorials
• Genesis Development and Tutorials
• Genesis Support

Below are a few plugins, tips, and reference links which will take you a long way to customizing your Genesis child theme easily and quickly.

Genesis “Hooks”

To control the content that displays on your posts and pages, I highly recommend the Genesis Simple Hooks plugin. It allows for easy control of the Genesis theme “hooks” so you can add or remove any Genesis functionality from your theme without needing to be a “coder” to do so.

The “hooks” are different areas of the site where you can insert or remove functionality or content, such as “before header,” “after header”, “before post”, “after post,” etc. Please refer to the Genesis Hook Reference for a description of all of these areas. These are also well described in the Genesis Simple Hooks Plugin.

Genesis Shortcodes

There are numerous “shortcodes” you can use in the Simple Hooks plugin (which will display in the Genesis area of WordPress after you install it). Refer to the Genesis Shortcode Reference to find the code to display the content you want on your sites. Add the shortcode to the appropriate area in the Simple Hooks plugin. For example, to display the post tags below each post, enter the post_tags shortcode in the simple hook “genesis_after_post_content” hook and click Save Changes. Badabing, badaboom, your tags will display at the bottom of the post:

Genesis Footer Widgets

To add widgets to your Genesis footer, you will need FTP access to your site and a text editor to edit the child theme’s functions.php file. Then, you can follow these instructions from the Genesis Tutorials site: Adding Widgets to the Genesis Child Theme Footer

Or, you can use this handy plugin to automatically add three footer widgets to your Genesis child theme: Genesis Footer Widgets.

Genesis Sidebars

Also, if you want different sidebars on different pages or posts, install the Genesis Simple Sidebars plugin. This plugin will let you create different sidebars easily which you can choose on a per page/post basis.

Genesis Simple Edits

This Genesis Simple Edits plugin creates a new Genesis settings page that allows you to modify the post-info (byline), post-meta, and footer area on any Genesis theme. Using text, shortcodes, and HTML in the textboxes provided in the admin screen, these three commonly modified areas are easily editable, without having to learn PHP or write functions, filters, or mess with hooks.

Other Genesis Plugins

You can find many other helpful Genesis plugins on the WordPress.org Plugin Repository.