johanvandemerwe

Users that have the Genesis Theme Framework installed are already known with the Genesis Featured Page 
plugin. This extended version looks almost the same, but adds the possibility to add a thumbnail of your 
own choice. This can be any image in your media library.
To add a different image, just switch off the “Show featured image” and place the name of the image in 
the URL. To make it even easier, you just enter here the name of the image as in “take-this-picture.png”. 
The plugin makes sure that the selected format is taken from your media library.
Bonus:
With this plugin it is also possible to show the excerpt of an article (which is not in the original Genesis plugin). 
!important! For this to work you have to install the Page Excerpt Plugin by Jeremy Massel.
How to use the image URL:
without month/year in media permalinks:
/montepulciano.jpg
with/year in media permalinks:
/10/2014/montepulciano.jpg
So you use the image name + extension starting after the /uploads in the media permalink. 
Don’t use the show featured image and the Image URL at the same time. That will show the featured image set in the page.
You can find that plugin here: 
<a href="https://wordpress.org/plugins/page-excerpt/" rel="ugc">Link to Page Excerpt Plugin by Jeremy Massel (opens in new window)</a>

Genesis Featured Page Extended

Extends the Genesis Featured Page plugin. Show as thumbnail any image in your media library and show your page excerpt. Requires Genesis Framework.

Bill Erickson

The Genesis Grid plugin was design to allow users of the Genesis theme to easily display their posts in a grid format.
“Features” are full-width posts at the top of the listing. “Teasers” are the posts broken into columns. You can set the number of Features and Teasers for both the homepage and inner pages, and how many columns the teasers are broken into.
You can also specify the image sizes used for Features and Teasers. I recommend setting Features for Large, and Teasers for Medium. Then go to Settings > Reading and set the dimensions of those images as needed. If you have already uploaded images, use the Regenerate Thumbnails plugin to rebuild the thumbnails at these dimensions. If images aren’t showing up, make sure you have “Include featured images” checked in Genesis > Theme Settings > Content Archives
Finally, you can specify where the grid loop is used by checking Home, Category Archives, Tag Archives, Taxonomy Archives, Author Archives, and/or Search Results. See the Developers section for more fine-grained control.
<a href="https://github.com/billerickson/Genesis-Grid/wiki" rel="nofollow ugc">Documentation</a>
No support will be provided by the developer

Genesis Grid

Customize your archive pages in Genesis to use a grid layout. Requires the Genesis theme.

Genesis Featured Page Extended vs Genesis Grid