Genesis 3.3.3 Available Now

Genesis 3.3.3 is now available and includes general improvements, bug fixes, and accessibility enhancements. 

Lazy Image loading

In Genesis 3.2.0, we added lazy image loading support for featured images, enabled by adding theme support for genesis-lazy-load-images. 

WordPress 5.5, which is currently scheduled for release on August 11, 2020, will bring image lazy loading for all images, including those in post and page content. 

Once you’ve updated to WordPress 5.5, genesis-lazy-load-images theme support is no longer necessary and can be removed from your child theme. If your theme supports it, Genesis 3.3.3 will continue adding loading=”lazy” for featured images for sites using WordPress versions below 5.5.

Block content in Genesis content limit

When using a content limit for archive pages and Genesis featured widgets, block content such as embed URLs and Image captions were previously included. Genesis now uses excerpt_remove_blocks to remove this content.

Allowed blocks can be updated to allow additional content by using the WordPress filter below:

add_filter( 'excerpt_allowed_blocks', 'child_theme_add_instagram_to_excerpt' );
/**
 * Adds additional desired blocks to excerpts and content limit.
 *
 * @param array $blocks Original allowed blocks.
 * @return array $blocks The modified allowed blocks.
 */
function child_theme_add_instagram_to_excerpt( $blocks ) {

	$blocks[] = 'core-embed/instagram';
	return $blocks;

}

Accessibility Improvements

The post title is now added as an aria-label to the <article> element to improve screen reader navigation when using VoiceOver’s rotor in Safari to view all articles on the page.

In the rotor, the word “article” was repeated for each article included on the page for those using screen readers.

With Genesis 3.3.3, the article title is used in the VoiceOver rotor in Safari.

Thanks to Nick Croft for this contribution!

Other improvements

• Changed “Enable auto-updates” text in WordPress 5.5 to text that describes where to enable Genesis update checks.
• Added missing permission_callback to public Genesis REST routes to prevent a notice under WordPress 5.5.
• Improved the standards for admin CSS.
• Removed the use of wp_make_content_images_responsive in archive, singular, and featured widget images; srcset is applied via wp_calculate_image_srcset in wp_get_attachment_image used by genesis_get_image.

View the Genesis Changelog