New WordPress Plugin: Genesis Featured Grid

It’s funny sometimes how much synchronicity there is in our lives. A couple weeks ago I was perusing the StudioPress Developer Resources and happened across a couple articles, How to Use the Genesis Grid Loop and Genesis Grid Loop Advanced, which explained the finer points of the new Grid Loop in Genesis 1.5.

As it was, I also happened to have a client project at the time which required a grid type layout for some posts in various templates. The site was fairly complex, with multiple templates required for different parts of the site, and my approach was to have multiple widget areas to display the Genesis Featured Pages & Posts widgets. This was all well and good for the list type display elements, but unfortunately the plugins didn’t have the capability to display anything other than that, and I had been racking my brain trying to figure out what I could do to address this issue. Needless to say, seeing the grid tutorials was quite fortuitous.

My first instinct was to search around and see if StudioPress or anyone else had already developed a grid plugin. Unfortunately it seems that one hasn’t been rolled out yet. I could have hard coded the grid formatting into the theme, like in the tutorials, but I’m not a big fan of reinventing the wheel, and it seems that there is potential for this to be reused over and over again, so I decided to create a widget.

The plugin itself is really straightforward. It’s based on the code from the Genesis Featured Posts plugin, but has been modified to assign odd and even style classes to each post, and inserts a new style sheet reference into the header with the proper CSS for aligning the grid. Simple yet elegant. If you’d like more information click over to the Genesis Featured Grid page I set up here.

I’ve submitted it to the WordPress.org Plugin Respository, so feel free to download it and give it a whirl. It requires the Genesis Framework already be installed on your server, and if you don’t have it, you may purchase it directly from StudioPress.

As I said, it’s pretty basic right now, and is limited to two posts across. I intend to update it in the future to allow the user to select different grid sizes, but alas, more client work calls first.

As with all Genesis Framework content, it is released under the GPL, so tinker with the code to your hearts content. I’d love to see what you come up with!

I really love getting feedback, so please feel free to post any comments or suggestions for future revisions below!

Download Now

http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/genesis-featured-grid

3 thoughts on “New WordPress Plugin: Genesis Featured Grid”

    1. Hey Ty,

      Great point, I’ll post a screenshot shortly.

      Basically, it just reformats the way the Genesis Featured Posts widget displays the posts. Instead of dispalying them in a single column, it displays the posts as two columns and a user selectable amount of rows.

  1. Great idea for a plugin and thanks for releasing it, although I haven’t used it yet. I just finished setting up the Grid Loop on a client site for their staff page, code works beautifully. You may be interested to know that I used it inside a custom category archive template. Any posts in the “employees” category get shown in a nice grid:)

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