Over the past few days I’ve been converting the dsignwrx.com site WordPress theme from Genesis to Divi. I was sad to see my beautiful custom Genesis theme go, but excited to see how the site would look and work with Divi. It was not as easy a change as I had hoped though.
One of my favorite gallery plugins doesn’t seem to work with Divi but since they haven’t updated the plugin in 2 years it was a good idea for me to find another masonry gallery plugin that is being maintained anyway. I use the Justified Image Grid plugin for most of my galleries but it doesn’t have a masonry layout which I prefer for some of my galleries, especially the website design gallery because of all the tall website images. I found the free Photoswipe Masonry Gallery plugin which is pretty good but it is somewhat limited and seems to not be perfectly centered on the page for some reason. It will do for now, hopefully the developer will add more features as time goes on, otherwise I will have to look into buying a premium one. I prefer gallery plugins like Photoswipe Masonry Gallery and JIG which work with the built in WordPress gallery, that way I can change plugins easier when I need to. The other free masonry gallery plugins I’ve seen make you work with custom post types or make you create the gallery items in the plugin instead of the WordPress gallery. Then you’re pretty much stuck with that plugin until you have to time to completely rebuild your galleries and who has time for that.
The thing I miss most about my Genesis theme is the Hooks feature especially when combined with the plugins Genesis Simple Hooks and Genesis Visual Hook guide. I think that’s why most people love Genesis and I can see why.
Now that WordPress is developing the Content Block Editor, I try to keep as many pages as possible on large sites in the built-in WordPress Block Editor so if I need to change themes in the future, it hopefully won’t be such a huge task. I do love the Divi Builder though for pages with complex layouts.
I’m testing out a different logo design also. A few years ago when I designed my new icon, I must have created dozens of them, then I narrowed it down to my favorite 6. I picked one that I liked to use on my site and business cards but last night I decided to try one of the other 6 out and use that at the top of each page in a pseudo element. In my Genesis site I had one in the same place that I placed there with a hook, it worked great because I could even make it a link. Unfortunately pseudo (a CSS term) elements don’t allow for links. I was disappointed to find this out.
I was especially please last night when I finished working on the site and I tested the speed on Pingdom Website Speed Test. I got a B speed rating instead of a C which the previous Genesis theme was rated as. That make all my hard work worth it!
I’m still working out some of the kinks and will continue to do so for a long while I’m sure.
Thanks for visiting!
Elizabeth