Genesis Child Theme Defaults

[bryanwillis]

First, nice theme. I started building my own bootstrap genesis theme, I was shocked to realize yours was the only one out there really. I've been using genesis for about 6 months now after a client made the request. Wish I would have made the switch a long time ago. The semantic markup functions and filters makes it worth it all in itself, in my opinion.

Anyway, to get to the point, I learned most of what I currently know about it from just browsing through the main theme as well as the enterprise-pro theme.

I always thought child themes were suppose to start with :

include_once( get_template_directory() . '/lib/init.php' );

Is there a reason you don't include that? It looks like by not including that you instead use genesis_setup

I can't quite figure out why this is or what the benefit of one way of doing things over the other is.

It seems complicated because without using:

include_once( get_template_directory() . '/lib/init.php' );

it appears you have to use genesis_setup anytime you want to do anything. Can you explain a little bit why you do it this way? Thanks for your help! I'll be sure to link your theme when I get mine all finished.

[salcode]

WordPress executes both the child theme functions.php and the parent theme functions.php in that order. You can read about it here Using functions.php in Child Themes.

With Genesis we spend a lot of time modifying the parent theme but in many cases we can't modify something that is not yet defined. For example: we can not remove an action in the child functions.php because it is added in the parent functions.php, which has not yet executed.

There are two ways to work around this:

1. Including the necessary parent theme at the beginning of the child theme functions.php include_once( get_template_directory() . '/lib/init.php' );
2. Execute the code in the child theme by attaching it to the hook genesis_setup priority 15 (after the defaults at 10).

While the StudioPress themes use the first method, I prefer the second.

I understand your point about the added complexity of attaching all the code to the genesis_setup action.

I wonder if it would make sense to execute the foreach in my functions.php on the genesis_setup action rather than on the execution of the file. This would eliminate the need to include the functions hooked to genesis_setup in each individual file.

[salcode]

I'm trying out a branch (referenced above) where I hook into genesis_setup priority 15 in functions.php and then within that action load the rest of the lib files. This is simplifying the files in lib/. Props to @bryanwillis for sending me down this path.

[salcode]

This modification has been merged into the master branch. Now functions.php loads all the files in the /includes directory on the genesis_setup hook at priority 15.