Posted on 14 Apr 2011 by Chris Ford

Check out the progress in
our Customizing Family Tree class!

We went over all of the new features in the upcoming Family Tree 1.2 and Genesis 1.6 releases, talked about basic customization skills, had a brief overview of Genesis Theme and Widget settings, and then jumped right into making Family Tree (even) cuter!

I walked the students through the thought process behind creating a custom header, footer and background images, then we went over installing Typekit for beautiful typography (look for an upcoming tutorial on how to integrate @font-face from scratch if you don’t want to use a hosted service, and then thank the student who asked that question, lol!).

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Posted on 13 Apr 2011 by Chris Ford

We started out wanting to fix a couple of minor details on our Family Tree theme. What started out as a couple of changes rapidly snowballed into a studs-out rebuild of the entire child theme.

Since the original version was built on the first release of Genesis, we wanted to make use of several of the feature upgrades that have occurred in the last several releases of both Genesis and WordPress. We have focused on usability, addressing common support and customization requests we’ve gotten over the first year of release.

We’re really excited about several of the design, usability and coding upgradesthat make up this massive upgrade! Here are some of the features we’ve included to make Family Tree even easier to use:

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Posted on 13 Apr 2011 by Chris Ford

I hit a business milestone yesterday – I actually gave up a tiny bit of control and hired someone to code a widget for the upcoming Family Tree 1.2 release.

I’ll have a much longer post about all of the new features and functionality later in the week, but I couldn’t wait to show off the coolness that is my new widget! (We’ve also made the slider proportional to a 6×4″ photo, making it easier to fit images into the frame without extreme cropping.)

Probably the #1 support request we get for Family Tree is “How do I customize the slider to use Pages instead of Posts?” The answer used to be “Edit the slider.php file”—but not any more! Once 1.2 is out (we’re aiming for shortly after Genesis 1.6 is released) the entire homepage will be widgeted, and you’ll be able to use the cool new Easy Slider widget to set it up.

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