Genesis

Jeff Burnz - October 19, 2008 - 15:27

Genesis Starter Theme Logo

Genesis is an standards compliant, accessible and semantically rich starter theme for Drupal 6. Genesis is easy to theme yet extremely flexible, giving you endless theming possibilities. Genesis makes building a standards compliant accessible theme easier than starting from scratch.

A few sites seen using Genesis:
http://design.acquia.com
http://www.myappleguide.com
http://laptopblog.gr
http://adaptivethemes.com
http://www.drupalcampireland.org
http://www.calthorpe.com

Key Features

Additional Features

  • Skip to main content link included
  • Work-around for IE Max 30 stylesheets issue
  • Equal Height Columns using jQuery (optional)
  • Preload CSS images jQuery plugin (optional)
  • WAI ARIA roles and other accessibility features
  • Clean admin styles, formatted tables, form elements & messages
  • Supports two microformats: rel="home" and rel="bookmark"
  • OpenID icon CSS fix

Validation and Accessibility

Gensis validates XHTML Strict, CSS3 and is WCAG AAA and WAVE compliant.

Valid XHTML, Valid CSS3, WCAG AAA, WAVE

Included Starter Subthemes

Genesis now includes three starter subthemes; genesis_SUBTHEME, genesis_ULTRALITE and genesis_DARK.

Genesis SUBTHEME:
No holds barred, this subtheme offers endless theming potential and is the starter theme of choice for complex designs and advanced layouts. Uses fully pseudo-namespaced class naming for easier theming and CSS management.
Genesis ULTRALITE:
A bare bones semantically rich starter theme for advanced themers or for basic themes that don't need the additional wrapper and inner div's of the standard subtheme.
Genesis DARK :
The DARK starter subtheme adds support for dark style themes, includes fully styled admin, tables, forms etc and supports Views, Panels and Vertical tabs. View screenshots.

See a more in depth comparison of Genesis SUBTHEME, Genesis ULTRALITE and Genesis DARK.

Genesis Concept

Genesis employs the top-down approach. The idea is to start with too much, add even more, and then prune what you don't need. This is similar to Views, CCK, Panels and many other Drupal projects—ultimately this approach offers endless theme potential without compromise. Firebug will speed up your development process and help you understand how the CSS works and how you can modify it. The Genesis modular stylesheets include many CSS selectors—these show up in Firebug where you can quickly add properties and prototype styles.

Genesis Starter Theme

Documentation

Versions

6.x-2.x
This is stable and the recommended version to use.
6.x-1.2
Deprecated. No feature updates, will be maintained (bug fixes only) until Drupal 7 is released.

Upgrading

Upgrading between stable 6.x-2.x versions is no problem, there have been no major HTML or structural changes since 6.x-2.0. You can simply overwrite the old base theme with the later version.

Upgrading from a 6.x-2 beta is more work, there were many changes and you will just have to work through them as its not possible for me to know what you have changed in your subtheme.

Upgrading directly from 6.x-1.x will break your theme. When I have ported some of the pre-styled themes to Genesis2 I will makes notes and post them in the Genesis docs.

NOTE: ALL the pre-styled subthemes are only compatible with 6.x-1.2! This includes Cold Day, Darkmatter, Typo 1, Webify, WebX and Zine. Over the next few weeks I will be releasing new versions for Genesis 6.x-2.x..

Genesis is built and maintained by AdaptiveThemes - Premium Themes for Drupal.

#D7CX: I pledge that Genesis will have a full Drupal 7 release on the day that Drupal 7 is released.

Releases

Official releasesDateSizeLinksStatus
6.x-2.42009-Jun-12154.6 KBRecommended for 6.xThis is currently the recommended release for 6.x.
6.x-1.22008-Nov-1897.46 KBSupported for 6.xThis release is supported but is not currently the recommended release for 6.x.
Development snapshotsDateSizeLinksStatus
6.x-2.x-dev2009-Jun-13154.61 KBDevelopment snapshotDevelopment snapshots are automatically regenerated and their contents can frequently change, so they are not recommended for production use.


 
 

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