Introducing Bigg: A free responsive child theme for Genesis

Bigg Genesis child theme

I’ve had this theme ready to release since about the middle of December, but with Christmas and a bout of illnesses in the family it kind of took a back seat – until now.

Then last week, Genesis (the framework that this theme is based on) launched version 1.9 and I had to do a few quick amends to make sure it worked.

So what the heck is “Bigg”?

When Digg relaunched with their minimal “v1″ design back in the Summer, I was immediately drawn to the design. I’ve always believed that less is more, especially with my very limited design skills, so the design was right up my street.

So when I decided to try my hand at a Genesis child theme a few months back, I decided to do a sort-of Digg clone. I remembered that the old Digg clone WordPress theme was very popular and figured this might be too.

If not, well at least I got to mess with Genesis and try to understand it a bit better.

The end result is nowhere near as elegant as the original (obviously) but I think it’s a pretty cool take on a WordPress theme and hopefully people will be able to mess with it, change stuff and use it to learn a bit more about WP and Genesis.

Bigg features

Here are some of the main features of Bigg, at a glance:

  • A grid loop homepage to showcase your featured work
  • Popular posts built into the home template
  • Fully responsive down to mobile
  • A four column, widget ready footer
  • A nifty jQuery scroll function on the home page
  • A thumbs up script for readers to like posts
  • Custom options to specify your featured category, social networks, and upload a logo
  • All the awesomeness of Genesis!

I can’t take all the credit for this. I’ve curated and hacked a lot of code that others much more talented than I have created, so I think it’s only fair I should give credit where credit is due.

  • Digg – These guys let me go ahead and develop this theme and although they didn’t want to link to me from their site (yet!) I am grateful they let me take a stab at it.
  • Genesis Sandbox – I used this awesome Genesis child theme as a starting point and a lot of the functionality (like responsiveness) was built into it. Massive hat tip to the guys at Sure Fire Web Services for creating such a great starter theme.
  • Bill Erickson – What this guy doesn’t know about Genesis theme development isn’t worth knowing. If you check out the functions.php file in Bigg you’ll see that a huge chunk of the code has come from the tutorials Bill shares for free. Thanks so much, Bill!
  • Geoffrey Rickaby – Another incredibly talent Genesis developer who shares a lot of great tutorials and customisations for free.
  • Orman Clark – The like/thumbs up script in Bigg is basically the Zilla Likes plugin customised to use a thumb instead of a heart. Massive thanks to Orman and the ThemeZilla team for released the plugin.

There were a bunch of other WordPress and PHP tutorials that I used for various things that I didn’t keep track of. If you see something in Bigg that you think comes from your code, tweet me and I’ll be happy to credit you.

The download

Note: Bigg is released as-is without any warranty, guarantees, or support. I don’t have the time to help you with support queries!

If you don’t already own Genesis, you’ll need to buy to use Bigg (it’s NOT included). It costs $70 but is well worth it for the flexibility, updates, well-structured code and awesome community supporting it.

Like Bigg? Then why not share?

Bigg is free as in beer, so it would be really cool if you could repay me for the download by tweeting this bad boy to the world. It’s not a requirement, but if you do share this then I’ll give you a digital high five and plenty of kudos. Fair?

Tell the world about Bigg!

EDIT: It took just 5 hours for Digg’s lawyers to request a change of font for the logo. Heh. ;)

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