Comment on SEO Silo Theme by SEO Dave.

SEO Silo Structure You can use the core WordPress Custom Nav Menu feature under “Appearance” >> “Menus” to build menus and use the core WordPress “Custom Menu” widget for using them on a sidebar. You’d use the Stallion Display Widget feature to limit which parts of the site the custom menus loaded on to maintaining your siloing.

Every WordPress Post and WordPress Page can override SOME main Stallion Responsive options.

Go edit a Post and look under the “Stallion Layout and Colour Scheme Options” box.

You can see there you can set

Sidebar Layout
Colour Scheme
Original Header
2011 Header Set
Top Banners
Disable All Ads

Using those settings you can set a different layout, colour scheme, header image etc… without any theme editing.

The above covers some of what you’ve asked about, this is for WordPress Posts and WordPress Pages, doesn’t cover categories or tags output.

You could have 10 WordPress Pages or Posts and set a different layout, colour scheme and header image for each. Since there’s 12 Stallion layouts and 40 Stallion Colour Schemes without any customization you can use any combination of the above on any WordPress Page or WordPress Post now.

There’s an advanced feature for using different templates for different parts of a site, with a fair amount of PHP customization you could build a category template that uses a particular layout and colour scheme (not built one, so don’t have an example).

Under “Stallion Theme” >> “Layout Options” turn “Custom Templates ON” which will add a new options page under “Appearance” >> “Category Templates”.

Here you can set entire categories to use a particular Page Template and/or set categories to use a category template.

This feature takes WordPress core to a new level. With WordPress core the custom template system only works with Static Pages, with Stallion Responsive it works with Static Pages, WordPress Posts (posts can use the page templates**) and Categories.

** WordPress core isn’t designed to allow different templates for posts, only static pages. I guess they worked on the principle webmasters would not want to have a different look for blog posts!

I’ve not built many category templates, but have built a number of page templates.

To expand Stallion/WordPress further you can build your own, but it’s not something I’ll cover via support here to a high level because it involves advanced PHP modification. Unless you understand PHP or mind a lot of testing to see how it works (that’s how I learnt PHP :-)) it’s not a case of make this minor edit and it works. It’s creating new php files, adding/removing PHP code to add/remove features.

For example I built a “Static Page Blank Sales No Sidebars” template (file: page-sales.php) which ignores which ever layout options set and always uses the full width layout (no sidebars: actually stripped the sidebar code out of the template) and is for building a home page that uses little of the Stallion CSS.

I couldn’t explain how to create this file in a comment, you need to understand some PHP to build custom templates and unless I think the template is useful to me or a lot of people I don’t create them.

Compare page-sales.php to page-example.php (this is what static pages normally look like) to see how different they are code wise. To use the full width layout all the time had to add the entire header.php template file and modify it.

There’s an example category and page template for starting with:

page-example.php – For Posts and Pages.
category-example.php – For categories.

Starting point would be make a copy of one of them, rename and edit as needed.

David