The Genesis Framework from StudioPress and the child themes that are compatible with it are some of the most popular WordPress themes available today.
Creating themes built on the Genesis Framework is also a popular approach to custom WordPress site development. This shows that the framework isn’t just favored by those looking for an attractive off-the-shelf site design, but also that it’s regarded as a well-coded and efficient platform for building custom WordPress themes from scratch.
When it comes to building an eCommerce store with WordPress, WooCommerce shares a similar position as the Genesis Framework in that it’s a popular choice with both developers and those looking for an off-the-shelf solution for adding eCommerce functionality to their site.
While these two products are both very popular options in their respective fields, they don’t always work together as well as they should. While the WooCommerce toolkit has been developed by WooThemes (who have their own selection of compatible themes), Genesis has been developed by StudioPress, with both teams creating their products in different ways.
So if you do go down the best-of-breed route and install these two products when building an eCommerce store with WordPress you might be disappointed with the initial results.
This lack of compatibility results in a loss of formatting affecting the presentation of some of the eCommerce pages on your site. This includes the individual product pages, product archive pages, and the product category and tag taxonomy pages, as well as some of the more general page layout settings such as the position of the sidebars.
For those working with the Genesis Framework and its child themes, as well as the WooCommerce plugin this can pose a bit of a problem.
Enter Genesis Connect for WooCommerce
Thankfully there is a free plugin which has been developed by the StudioPress team that replaces those page templates from WooCommerce which don’t display correctly when this eCommerce toolkit is used on a Genesis-powered site.
The Genesis Connect for WooCommerce plugin replaces the offending WooCommerce templates with Genesis-compatible ones. This allows you to seamlessly integrate these popular WordPress tools and have the Genesis Framework, a Genesis child theme, and WooCommerce all working together in harmony on your site.
As the Genesis Connect for WooCommerce plugin is child-theme friendly, it works with your Genesis child theme allowing you to make your own changes to the templates, safeguarding those customizations from being overwritten when the plugin is updated.
Setting up the plugin is pretty straightforward. However it is necessary to edit your child theme’s function file and add a line of code to it. As the purpose of the plugin is to allow you to safely customize the WooCommerce product page templates in order to have them match the formatting of your Genesis child theme, you will need to have the ability to make those customizations yourself.
If those skills are beyond your reach then one option is to hire the services of a WordPress developer to make the integration between WooCommerce and Genesis a more seamless and user friendly experience.
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