Archive for July, 2011
Although WordPress is the undisputed leader as a website CMS (yes, it is a CMS), “real” developers snub their noses at WordPress because it is just a “blog” and doesn’t have all the power of Drupal or Joomla.
Enter the Genesis Framework and the StudioPress suite of child themes. I have built dozens of sites with StudioPress, and am incredibly impressed. It is JUST what I needed to add power and consistency to my sites.
By using Genesis/StudioPress for WordPress, I get the best of both worlds, the ease of use of the most popular platform (and there is a good reason it is), and the power and scalability of more “advanced” CMS platforms.
It isn’t free, but if you are in the business of building websites, then the nominal life-time fee for support from solid programmers, dozens of super high quality child themes, and the powerful framework and suite of plugins is well worth the price.
There are other frameworks, but Genesis has the advantage of being late in the game and building from the ground up a extremely powerful set of hooks and functions that is tightly integrated in the WordPress 3.0+ way of doing things. The fact that it uses child themes in itself makes it far superior to frameworks such as Thesis.
Non-programmers will find the modularized structure hard to understand, but if you get over the learning curve, you’ll see the incredible power it provides. I now build ALL my websites in Genesis, even custom sites, and am even converting my old projects to the framework so all my sites have a consistent grounding.
Loren Taylor is an author who needed a new ecommerce site for his book.
FSI teamed with Daisy Olsen to theme the custom PSD into Genesis Studiopress framework on WordPress.
The site has custom post types for endorsements and his “Mileposts,” which give wisdom tidbits for life’s journey.
Jen White is running for Mayor of Nyack, NY. FSI built a custom, clean, simple website in WordPress with a Genesis framework. The site is optimized to get the word out, via a video which automatically selects the most recent upload to a YouTube account, and a Tweet widget to push out any current information from the candidate.