Ever since the release of Genesis 2.0 and the introduction of the HTML5 markup structure, we’ve been extremely happy with the maturity and stability of the framework. Very few bugs have come up, and we continue to grow the Genesis developer and user community by extraordinary numbers every month.
3300+ members of an unofficial, community run #GenesisWP Facebook group.
That amazes me.
— Nathan Rice 💬 (@nathanrice) July 31, 2015
But that doesn’t mean we’re standing still.
Genesis 2.2 is a huge leap forward for the framework, and I’m happy to report that it’s available NOW as an upgrade in your dashboard.
Click here to view the Genesis 2.2 changelog.
Accessibility
One of the struggles of the modern web designer or developer is trying to create a beautiful, functional web, while at the same time not making the web less usable for people with disabilities. This is, as you might imagine, a difficult job.
So we brought in an expert to help us.
Rian Rietveld, creator of the Genesis Accessible plugin and the Leiden child theme, graciously committed to making Genesis 2.2 a powerhouse of A11y compliance, and she followed through with that commitment, creating an easy to work with and easy to enable system for making child themes WCAG 2.0 compliant, as well as making recommendations and providing us with tools to make our future child themes compliant as well.
She also wrote out detailed instructions for enabling and working with all the new A11y features in Genesis 2.2.
Schema.org Microdata Improvements
As the web evolves, we want to make sure we take notice and allow Genesis to evolve with it. As you know, Genesis is one of the few WordPress themes that fully utilizes Schema.org microdata and HTML5 in our markup. But there are always improvements to be made, and we’ve continued to watch the changing recommendations and adapt as necessary.
And the great thing is, you don’t have to do a thing. Just upgrade, and the improvements go live.
Entry Meta
In the past, if you registered a public Custom Post Type, the display of that CPT entry meta on the front end was inconsistent and difficult to remove. We’ve fixed that.
Now, if you want to remove entry meta from a public CPT, you simply remove post type support for the entry meta that would normally display before and after entry content.
Title Tag Support
As of WordPress 4.1, title tags can now be automatically output rather than manually output by a theme. If a child theme chooses to do this, Genesis 2.2 will now defer to the generated title tag, rather than invoking any functions directly.
Site Icon Support
WordPress 4.3 introduced a site icon (AKA favicon) uploader capability. You can find the feature in the Customizer > Site Identity panel.
Normally, Genesis searches for favicon files in various locations, but in Genesis 2.2, we now look for the WordPress favicon first, then fall back to searching for files directly in theme folders if necessary.
And of course, there’s the usual enhancements and bug fixes that go into any release.
Special Thanks
A LOT of people helped create this release, and I’d like to say a special thanks to them all.
Rian Rietveld, for providing the expertise and code to allow Genesis to be accessible to all web users.
Carlo Manf and Sal Ferrarello for providing quality feedback and pull requests on a consistent basis.
Gary Jones for his genuine passion for excellence and commitment to the Genesis community. His input is invaluable to me.
Nick Cernis and Jen Baumann for finding problems, and just as often providing solutions to those problems.
And of course, our other contributors for the 2.2 cycle, Travis Smith, Greg Rickaby, Brian Bourn, Robin Cornett, Bill Erickson, Carrie Dils, and Josh Eaton.