I’m sure you’ve probably at least heard of Genesis – no, I’m not talking about my blog.  I’m referring to the WordPress theme.  I use the Genesis Framework on nearly every one of my personal sites, and nearly every site I build for clients too!

What is a framework theme?

A framework is where you have the ‘guts’ (for the lack of a better term) that run the theme installed separately on your site, and is referred to from within a child theme.  The child theme is where you get the look and design elements of your site.

So Genesis acts as a framework of files that works behind the scenes, in conjunction with the activated child theme on your site, to give your site the full functions and features of both the Genesis framework, and the design and look from the child theme.

So you need to have both the Genesis framework and the child theme installed in your theme folder for WordPress; but you only activate the child theme. [Read more...]