Since its conception over one year ago, Genesis has always been about offering valuable features, while at the same time allowing maximum control through the use of intelligent Theme Settings, liberal use of action hooks and filters, and semantic markup. This is our driving passion, and today, Genesis 1.4 proves yet again that it is the only framework you’ll ever need.
This release has a little something for everyone. It offers more control to developers who use Genesis to run their development business; it offers more SEO control for professional publishers; and it offers increased flexibility for bloggers and casual users too!
Ready to talk specifics? Let’s do it …
Import/Export Settings
This feature has been high on the demand list for quite some time now, and we’re SO happy we can finally offer this to our users.
Basically, the Genesis Theme and SEO settings are now completely portable, so you can back up, restore, and transfer settings from one install to another.
Why is this so awesome? Consider the following tasks …
- Switching Hosts
- Routine backups
- Develop locally, transfer to live site
These are now dead-simple to accomplish with the new Import/Export feature in Genesis 1.4.
User Settings, More Control
We know that not all sites have a single author. And sometimes, you don’t want your authors messing around with Theme Settings, Layouts, and SEO. So, Genesis 1.4 introduces a user control system that will allow you, the site administrator, to turn off these features on a per-user basis, all from the user management page.
Also, for those of you who manage sites for clients, this is a GREAT way of “locking” them out of features you don’t want them to change. Now YOU have control over what they have access to.
Even More SEO
Building on the outrageous success of the new SEO features we introduces in Genesis 1.3, and combining that with the user control we’re introducing in Genesis 1.4, you can now access the same types of SEO options for your author archives as you currently enjoy on your category and tag archives!
This is HUGE for multi-author blogs, where author pages need to rank well. You can now control a custom doctitle, META Description, Intro title and text, and other important SEO details for each and every author/user on your site!
Also, one of the requests we got quite often was for a character counter for our SEO fields. Again, Genesis 1.4 delivers.
Author Box, Now Per-User
Everyone loves the fact that Genesis allows you to place an “author box”, with information about the current post author and their Gravatar, at the end of each post. But maybe you don’t want to have that box at the bottom of EVERY author’s posts. Well, now you have that option!
You can also choose to display the author box at the top of the author’s archive page. Sweet!
Developers: You Can Now Register/Unregister Layouts!
We’ve all been there. You design and develop the perfect child theme, but your client decides to mess with the layout options. Which is fine, except they complain to you when one of the layouts doesn’t look quite right.
We’ve got you covered.
Instead of disabling the layout selector altogether, or locking them out of Theme Settings, use the new genesis_unregister_layout() function to unregister any of the default layouts that Genesis ships with.
OR, if the default layouts are insufficient for your needs, use the genesis_register_layout() function, along with your own custom CSS, to create any layout you want!
Lots of Minor Improvements
And of course, we take your feedback on the forums very seriously. We’ve been busy fixing small bugs and constantly improving performance with each new release. We sincerely hope you enjoy this new release.
Genesis customers should be seeing the notification to upgrade in their dashboards, or you can get the ZIP directly by visiting the forums. Everyone else, get your copy of Genesis 1.4 today! Enjoy design controls with our new Prose Theme, or take advantage of one of our many turnkey designs.