Genesis framework is probably one of the most popular WordPress theme framework as Genesis makes any theme special in many ways, whether its in terms of the actually design of the site, the functionality of the site or even optimising your site for SEO, you will find there are many plugins which are make specifically for the Genesis framework to make it even more powerful. So for this week WordPress Wednesday you will see that below is a small collections of 8 of the best Genesis plugins that will add tons of functionality.

1. Genesis Connect for WooCommerce

This plugin replaces the WooCommerce’s built-in shop templates with its own Genesis-ready versions, specifically this plugin will replace the single-product.php, archive-product.php and taxonomy.php templates these are needed to display the single product page, the main shop page, and Product Category and Product Tag archive pages. These allow easy customisation of these templates, and ensure that you do not lose your customisations when the plugin is updated, you can place your own copies of these templates in your child theme’s ‘woocommerce’ folder and customize these copies as much as you like.

2. Genesis Custom Footer

This plugin adds a section to the Genesis Theme Settings page where users can enter HTML to output in the site footer in place of the default Genesis footer credits. You can use any of the existing Genesis footer shortcodes, your own HTML, or just simple text but [lease note: If your child theme has a function for a custom footer already, it will override the plugin’s settings.

3. Genesis Toolbar Extras

This plugin just adds a lot Genesis Framework related resources to your toolbar / admin bar, also links to all settings pages of this framework are added making life for webmasters a lot easier. So you might just switch from the front-end of your site to the Genesis ‘Theme Settings’ or adjust additional extensions like ‘Genesis Simple Hooks’, ‘AgentPress Listings’, ‘Genesis Media Project’ etc.

4. Genesis Connect for Easy Digital Downloads

This plugin provides optimised the templates for the ‘download’ Custom Post Type of the Easy Digital Downloads plugin for the use with Genesis Framework and child themes. To allow easy customisation of these templates, and ensure that you do not lose your customisations when the plugin is updated, you can place your own copies of these templates in your child theme’s /edd/ folder and customize these copies as much as you like.

5. Genesis Social Profiles Menu

This plugin is a small and lightweight as it is intended for the use with the popular Genesis Framework. It adds a special stylesheet for social profile icons for the WordPress custom menu system. The menu system is connected with the (Genesis) menu locations and also with widget areas because WordPress comes with a built-in custom menu widget. This way you can assign social profiles to a lot of locations on your site and easily add your own links, change sorting, change size, tooltips and opening in a new window/tab.

So you have a lot of advantages over lots of other social profiles widget plugins around… As soon as you’re figured out to add the CSS classes it’s really easy, fast and flexible. For most use cases and regular Genesis Child Themes this should work really fine. Additional CSS styling/adjusting via child theme is possible of course.

6. Genesis Design Palette

This plugin creates a new Genesis settings page that allows you to design the Genesis theme. This plugin has settings for various colors, font stacks, sizes, borders, and more. The plugin writes a CSS file (that can be cache’d) and loads.

7. Genesis Easy Columns

This plugin easily integrates Genesis column classes into your WordPress editor. With the click of a button, you can now add column class shortcodes to your page or post. You will no longer have to know any HTML or CSS. Use the power of the built in Genesis column classes, with the simple click of a button.

8. Genesis Bootstrap Carousel

This plugin called Genesis Bootstrap Carousel (GBC) will allows you to create a simple responsive image carousel that displays the featured image, along with the title and excerpt from each post. GBC is based off of the Genesis Responsive Slider and uses a lot of the same code.

The main difference is that the Genesis Bootstrap Carousel uses the Carousel jquery plugin created by the open source Twitter Bootstrap Project, the carousel.js in this plugin is roughly 1/4 the size of the jquery flexslider.js used by the Genesis Responsive Slider and with the CSS in this plugin is about half the size of the Genesis Responsive Slider plugin. Genesis Bootstrap Carousel also includes options to easily disable the CSS and JS of the plugin, allowing you to move scripts or styles into a combined file inside your theme. Including in this plugin is the use of CSS to make the next/previous arrows which helps avoid with HTTP request these arrows allowing for easy customisation via CSS. You may also choose what specific post/page IDs the carousel JS and CSS get loaded on a this way you can avoid loading assets on pages that are not using the Carousel and avoid unnecessarily increasing page load time.