Any time I am creating a website using the Genesis Framework, I always have at least one additional website open: Chris's Genesis Visual Hook Guide. This has proven priceless for me as I create websites and troubleshoot mine as well as others. Since many of us are visually inclined, this makes the many hooks, filters, & markup visible in a semi-static way.

Another tool that has recently appeared is Rafal Tomal's Genesis Hooks Tool. Rafal has the user drop the file in the Child Theme folder and call it via functions.php, and the file shows where all the hooks are in your Child Theme. Sometimes Child Theme home pages don't contain all the hooks and this can be quite frustrating when trying to place something on the home page via hooks. However, Rafal's tool easily identifies the hooks that are in play and displays them on the screen!

Check out both of these helps. Please let me know if you know of any other helps for Genesis Development!

Besides the Genesis plugins that are listed by StudioPress, there are some excellent Genesis plugins in the larger community.

Widgets
First and foremost is the one created by Nick_theGeek: Genesis Featured Widget Amplified. Simply I believe Nick's widget does an excellent job. The other Genesis widgets are: Genesis Featured Grid by Heavy Digital and Enhanced Latest Tweets by Travis and Nick, which needs updating. However, we also fail to mention the Child Theme custom widgets that have not been developed into plugins.

Theme Settings
There are three plugins that add to the Theme Settings Page:

1. WPChildThemes's Genesis Layout Manager, which allows you to set the theme's layout based on the simple conditionals (Home Page, 404 Page, Search Page, Date Archive Page, Author Page, Category Page, Tag Page, Taxonomy Page, "Post" Page, "Page" Page).
2. Nick_theGeek's Genesis Style Select, which allows you to easily change CSS files in the Child Theme (and will probably phased into Genesis core).
3. Cochran's Genesis Post Teasers, auto generates post teasers for Genesis blog style homepage.
4. While this one doesn't add to the Theme Settings Page, it appears at the same level under the Genesis heading. Cochran's Genesis Favicon Uploader adds a theme option page to genesis to allow the user to upload a favicon without ftping into the themes folders.

Genesis Simple Plugins
In keeping with the Genesis Simple Sidebars, Ron Rennick created Simple Menus, which allows you to assign WordPress navigation menus to the secondary navigation menu within the Genesis Theme Framework on a per post, per page, or per tag/category archive basis.

And though only connected by name, Genesis Simple Headers by John Hawkins allows you to easily upload a header image (however, I haven't been able to get this to work on any of my installs).

And Genesis - Comment Title allows you to change the default title on the comments area on WordPress posts and pages through a dashboard widget, that I couldn't find.

WordPress Admin Bar
Two plugins essentially do the same thing: Remkus de Vries's Genesis Admin Bar Addition and Gary Jones's Genesis Admin Bar Plus. Gary admits that his plugin is a rewrite of DeFries "as a class to remove function pollution from the global scope." If you like the Admin Bar and are a Genesis Developer/User, then you'll love Gary's plugin.

So, one of the things, I started doing was "protecting" my child themes by moving everything out of functions.php. I create a folder called lib or custom with a file called functions.php (contains various functions) and/or child-setup.php (contains things like registering custom post types, custom taxonomies, meta boxes, registering/unregistering layouts/sidebars, theme support, image sizes, and site-wide changes like the moving or removing of post meta/breadcrumbs, etc.).

Then in my functions.php file, I add a few require_once statements with important titles and a death warning not to remove any of these statements. So a theme functions.php may look like:

[php]<?php
/********************************************************************************/
//DO NOT EDIT! EDITING THIS SECTION CAN HAVE SERIOUS RAMIFICATIONS!
// Start the engine
require_once(TEMPLATEPATH.'/lib/init.php');
//Start Child Theme engine
require_once(STYLESHEETPATH.'/lib/init.php');
//Custom Child Theme library
require_once(STYLESHEETPATH.'/custom/custom-footer.php');
require_once(STYLESHEETPATH.'/custom/child-setup.php');
require_once(STYLESHEETPATH.'/custom/functions.php');
/********************************************************************************/
//Add any extra functions, below here! Enjoy!

[/php]

Are there any tricks that you use?

There are many times due to adding various actions that I will accidentally do something (like adding an additional wrap wrongly) that will cause havoc on my sidebar where my sidebar will appear below my content. What happens is that the #sidebar is now subordinate to #content instead of them appearing together in #content-sidebar-wrap (or whatever). So I have found a simple solution for this when this happens. I move my sidebar up.

I simply add this to my functions.php file:
[php]
remove_action('genesis_sidebar','genesis_do_sidebar');
add_action('genesis_before_content', 'genesis_do_sidebar');[/php]

Yes, I recognize that this is only a bandaid, but...