Genesis 2.6 Now Available

After a very successful beta, we’re happy to announce that Genesis 2.6 is now available. You can upgrade through your dashboard now, or download the Genesis 2.6 in your my.StudioPress.com dashboard.

The Customizer

Although our settings pages have served our users well over the years, WordPress has introduced a more modern approach to setting up your theme called the Customizer. It displays a live preview of your site as you are tweaking things like your layout, header image, and other settings.

As of Genesis 2.6, all of the settings that are present in the Theme and SEO settings pages are now also available in the customizer.

Title Tag

Genesis now fully supports (default on) the WordPress-generated title tag. We also built an entirely new class to handle building the title tag parts that WordPress will output, making Genesis even more compatible with all modern SEO plugins.

AdSense Auto Ads

If you’re an AdSense user, or are looking to monetize your website, Genesis 2.6 now includes automatic integration of AdSense Auto Ads. All you need to do is paste your Publisher ID in the new setting field in either the Theme Settings, or the new Customizer panel. If you’ve enabled Auto Ads, AdSense takes care of placing your ads where they will perform best.

Developer Friendly Additions

Thanks to the excellent efforts of Gary Jones and Christoph Herr, Genesis now includes the tooling to perform integration, system, and unit tests, along with checks for compliance with WordPress Coding Standards.

And as always, we continue to improve our inline documentation with each release.

Genesis is also moving more and more toward a true object oriented approach to our code. We’ve moved most of our significant code to classes and implemented an autoloader for them.

If you are a developer interested in getting involved with Genesis, there has never been a better time!

Changelog

Below is a detailed list of the changes in Genesis 2.6.

As always, feel free to send any bug reports to our support team. You can also give me a shout on Twitter (@nathanrice) and I’ll look into it.

Fixed

• More compliance with WordPress coding standards.
• Set ID of entry-pings to comments if only pings exist.
• Ensure default settings get saved to database in new installs.
• Change h3 to h2 for titles in admin metaboxes.
• Ensure theme support for Genesis import / export menu before outputting.
• Check for post parents before outputting parent in breadcrumbs.
• Ensure [post_tags] and [post_categories] are valid for post type before outputting.
• Update aria-label attributes for nav elements to remove redundant “navigation” word.

Added

• Add option to sort Featured Posts by date modified.
• Add contextual filter for content passed through the Markup API.
• Add Genesis_Customizer class.
• Add Genesis_SEO_Document_Title_Parts class.
• Add title-tag theme support by default.
• Add class autoloader.
• Add support for AdSense Auto Ads.
• Add `aria-label` attribute to secondary nav element.
• Add allowance for extra attributes on script tags for registered scripts.

Changed

• Change urls to https wherever possible.
• Update to normalize.css 7.0.0.
• Duplicate all theme and SEO settings in the customizer.
• Move all classes to their own files in lib/classes.
• Use Markup API for entry-title-link.
• Use Markup API for 404 page title.
• Change description for headings on archive pages to account for a11y.
• Improve color scheme retrieval function.

Removed

• Remove duplicate genesis_load_favicon.
• Remove header right widget area screen reader h2.
• Remove screen reader h2 from inside primary nav element.
• Remove feed settings if Genesis 2.6 is your first version.