Genesis 3.2 Beta – Ready to Try

It’s time for a fresh Genesis beta! Genesis 3.2 beta is out right now – as always, this beta is packed with hotly requested features for developers and site owners alike.

Edit entry meta in the Customizer

Genesis Simple Edits is one of the most popular Genesis plugins, and for good reason. Sometimes, you just want to tweak a couple of common things without cracking open a code editor.

After successfully moving the setting to edit the footer from Genesis Simple Edits to Genesis core in 3.1.0, allowing the entry meta (above and below entry content) to be editable via the Customizer just made good sense.

Open Graph tag support

We’ve done well over the years to stick to the SEO basics in Genesis. For more complicated SEO setups, or features that tend to change frequently, we recommend people use a plugin like Yoast SEO.

After monitoring the Open Graph protocol for a couple of years now, we feel confident in offering basic support for Open Graph tags for things like title, description, image, content type, and URL.

Open Graph is a very useful (and often requested) feature for making sure that the right title, description, and image are used when sharing pages from your site on various social/sharing platforms.

Note: This feature is opt-in, meaning that it will not be enabled by default. You must enable it via the SEO Settings in the Customizer. And because this feature is part of the Genesis SEO settings, it will be disabled if any of a select group of SEO plugins are active on your site.

Don’t worry, if you have Yoast installed, the Genesis feature will still yield to that plugin. The feature itself will also be disabled if the following plugins are detected as active:

• OG
• Jetpack‘s Open Graph module
• Open Graph
• Open Graph and Twitter Card Tags
• Complete Open Graph

Disable footer widgets on a per-entry basis

Because of the way Genesis generates output for the front end, we have the ability to disable many of the elements that get output by default by adding admin controls. Traditionally, this was done as either a theme setting or using custom fields with custom metaboxes on the editor screen.

But since adding the Genesis sidebar to the block editor, Gutenberg, in Genesis 3.1, we can expose new controls to users to allow for more choice in how you display individual entries to readers.

For Genesis 3.2, we’re exposing a new checkbox that lets you disable the footer widget output on individual posts and pages.

Native lazy-loading images in Chrome

Starting with Chrome 76, you can specify that images be lazy loaded, which is to say, loaded only when the user actually gets close to scrolling them into the viewport.

This not only saves bandwidth (for mobile users, this can be a huge deal), but it also makes your site feel much faster, since the browsers doesn’t have to spend time downloading images that are way outside the viewport.

This used to require a bit of JavaScript to accomplish, but now that Chrome supports this feature natively (with Firefox to possibly follow), we can simply add an attribute to all images served via the WordPress image retrieval and output functions.

To enable this feature, you’ll need to add support for it in your child theme’s functions.php file, like so:

add_theme_support( 'genesis-lazy-load-images' );

Markup API now accepts attributes directly

The Genesis Markup API is a powerful tool that allows almost every piece of Genesis generated markup to be modified using dynamic filters, including markup attributes.

But for some reason, we didn’t build the output function with the ability to accept and output attributes at the point of use. Instead, you had to write separate filter functions to set the initial attributes of any given piece of markup.

Genesis 3.2 will allow a new parameter on genesis_markup() that you can use to set the initial attributes for the markup you’re outputting.

Try Genesis 3.2 for yourself, right now!

Grab the beta plugin to test out the Genesis 3.2 beta, then reach us here with your questions and suggestions:

• The GenesisWP Slack workspace is where the Genesis community and development team hangs out.
• The StudioPress account help page helps StudioPress customers send comments and feedback.
• The WP Engine Customer Portal lets you reach us if you’re a WP Engine account holder.

We hope you enjoy all these new features and improvements that Genesis 3.2 brings to your WordPress sites.