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WordPress

Katherine Elsken
Katherine Elsken
2,330 Points

Foundation 5 and Genesis?

Has anyone tried to mix foundation with the Genesis framework? I've built a mockup in foundation, but my team strongly urges me to use Genesis for this project.

has anyone ever made this work?

I dont see Genesis tutorials anywhere on Treehouse - am I wrong?

7 Answers

It looks like Google search results have successfully eluded my efforts but I may finally have the answer you're looking for. (Obvious, though, right? It's only CSS and HTML mostly in the Foundation framework!)

Quote from We Love the Genesis Framework for WordPress – Here’s Why:

"The real powerhouse of Genesis framework is its robust hook system. WordPress itself has hooks, but Genesis adds to that hook list and gives you methods to easily insert, remove, or manipulate the HTML for a given component of the WordPress interface. Want to remove the title text and replace it with a custom sidebar area? Piece of cake. Want to wrap the HTML for the author byline with your own custom div structure so you can do some fancy CSS? No problem. Want to incorporate the Foundation 5 responsive CSS framework into your new theme? Easy breezy. And because of the way Genesis is designed, you are usually just adding a couple of lines of code rather than editing an entire page template."

Katherine Elsken
Katherine Elsken
2,330 Points

When trying to combine the two, I find myself heavily modifying certain hooks and inserting foundation 5 markup into them. Sometimes this works, but when you modify hooks so drastically sometimes this can cause the page to break, which is very frustrating. I am also getting to the point where I just might use a Founation 5 child theme next time as well.

I'm actually in the middle of doing exactly what you asked about. Stay tuned and I will get a tutorial up.

In my opinion Genesis is the best framework for WordPress available. It very fast has schema already embedded into any Genesis 2.0 and above framework. It is extremely developer friendly. The trick to understanding it is simply knowing that widgets control almost everything.

I will say with WordPress that hosting is a big deal as it should be with anything.

Using a quality hosting company will go a long way.

Yes, but Genesis is a WP framework. Foundation 5 is a front-end responsive framework. We want to utilize both in a child theme.

I'm at a point where I might abandon using both of these together. I found myself stripping away, or heavily modifying the Genesis markup to work well with Foundation 5, instead of just allowing rows and columns WITHIN the default Genesis layout. In the end, the benefits of Genesis simply weren't worth merging the two, and I decided to pursue a full Foundation 5 approach using a basic child theme. This is still something I'd like to look into in the future, but currently it's just not worth the effort.

Brian Hayes
Brian Hayes
20,986 Points

Well, my original integration was for a client. My plan was to take the core I built and polish it up into a boilerplate/stater theme. I planned to have a SCSS version powered by Gulp, and then a version that integrates the full CSS version of Foundation.

However with the release of Foundation 6, I've decided to use the new version. As of now I'm in rapid development of the SCSS boilerplate version, since that's the one I will personally use for my projects.

I'll post the repo once I have something.

I think Reverie uses Foundation.

For a second there I thought Reverie was a Genesis theme with some Foundation in it but maybe not.

In this article Justin Tadlock (creator of Hybrid) claims theme hooks are outdated, however, he later confirms in the comments that themes like Genesis are not outdated because they always receive updates. I thought that part was interesting. Is he essentially saying that theme hooks were an early implementation that no one would dare use anymore, unless of course you are providing updates to an older theme / framework / Wordpress maybe?

I think that might be the case. But anyhow I've heard great things about Genesis and actually own their framework myself. I did however find things difficult to customize and somewhat buggy, widgets added, removed, etc.

There have been Bootstrap + Genesis combos — one called Genesis Sandbox in particular but I'm thinking what you're asking about is non existent at this point.

Brian Hayes
Brian Hayes
20,986 Points

I'm currently working on a theme that merges Genesis with Foundation 5. So far I've had a lot of success in making the necessary markup modifications and additions necessary for Foundation to work. My plan will be to finish up the theme I'm doing for a client using this method, and then creating a boilerplate type theme with Genesis and Foundation merged together. I'd also be including gulp.js as a taskrunner and eventually I plan to add bower as well, but for now I'm just focusing on putting the two frameworks together. Once I have that accomplished, I'll start adding all the nice stuff.

Since the theme I'm working on right now is for a client, it's private and such, but once I start work on the boilerplate theme I'll set up a public github repo.

I did check out the Genesis Sandbox theme, but I can't say I was all that happy. it didn't employ the responsive grid system and was designed desktop-first.

Francois Dejardin
Francois Dejardin
1,778 Points

Hi :)

Come back to you because your project seems interesting...

Do you plan to release it or was it just a project ?

Please let me known where you are in it , trying myself to implement Foundation in Genesis

thanks !

François

Sean Clarke
Sean Clarke
10,256 Points

Cool Joey, I look forward to seeing what you put together, I think its a good combo :) Bests - Sean