Ready to try Genesis 3.0.0 Beta?

Genesis 3.0 is coming June 19th, and we couldn’t be more excited!

This release has been months in the making, and we’re thrilled to share with you some details about the release, what you can do today to prepare for this version, as well as run the beta a full 3 weeks before the official reveal.

Genesis + AMP

As many of you know, AMP is a technology created by Google to accelerate the web by optimizing the code used by websites (with a little help from Google’s cache).

Thanks to the folks at Google and XWP, along with long time friend of the Genesis community, Tonya Mork, Genesis now provides internal integration with the AMP spec, as well as the tools to make child themes AMP compatible as well.

More details and documentation on how to make Genesis themes AMP compatible will be coming prior to the official launch of Genesis 3.0, but for a good place to start, we’ve updated our Genesis Sample child theme with AMP compatibility, so feel free to take a look at that and start to tinker.

Cleaning Up

Genesis is over 9 years old (!) and with age definitely comes some baggage. But fortunately, our team has been eyeing ways of cutting loose some of the old and outdated code that Genesis has carried for too long.

Among the changes are:

• Removing all the unnecessary root template files.
• Removing the Theme and SEO Settings page content (Customizer is now the way to customize Genesis).
• Removing all markup that wasn’t HTML5. HTML5 is now the exclusive markup format in Genesis.
• Removing Adsense Auto Ads integration in favor of simply using the Header Scripts setting.
• Removing Google Plus integration, since it has now been shut down.
• Removing all the CSS in the style.css file. Genesis should never be active anyway.
• Removing all functions deprecated prior to Genesis 2.8.
• Removing compatibility with very old breadcrumb plugins.
• Output the responsive viewport meta tag by default.

Yes, this is a pretty big list, but most of these changes were a long time coming. They just make sense to update or remove.

Goodbye Blog Page Template

I know this one is going to make some of you sad, but I think ultimately our solution will make you happy again.

Yes, we’re removing the Blog Page template. First of all, if you’re simply looking to make one of your pages display blog posts (for instance, in the case where your homepage is static), you can use a built in WordPress feature to do this.

But if you were using the Blog Page template for something like a custom loop to pull in very specific posts, we have a solution for that as well.

Genesis has a built in feature that, up until this point, we called an “Easter Egg” … a neat little feature that we didn’t really talk about, but that could maybe make your life a little easier if you knew about it.

This “Easter Egg” allowed you to use a custom field to modify the query on a page, as long as that page was using the Blog Page template.

Now that we’ve retired the Blog Page template, you can use this feature on ANY page. Check out this tutorial and remember that this feature is now available on all pages. It should allow you to essentially duplicate the functionality of the Blog Page template, even though that template is no longer available.

Learn More about Genesis 3.0.0 Beta

We keep a detailed changelog for each release. The changelog for Genesis 3.0.0 can be found here.