Comment on Custom Posts Widget by SEO Dave.

Stallion Responsive Theme Single Posts Widget What you describe is pretty much default Stallion Responsive output, though I’ve changed various default options for performance SEO reasons for Stallion Responsive 8.1 (the using any image thumbnail feature can be costly in database queries) so if this is a new Stallion Responsive 8.1 install it won’t be setup to show thumbnails by default.

What to change from Stallion Responsive 8.1 default settings.

“Stallion Theme” >> “Colour Options”

Under “Auto and Featured Thumbnails” set “Thumbnails” to either:

“Auto and Featured Thumbnails ON**”
or
“Featured Thumbnails Only ON”

Read the options instructions to decide which.

set “Thumbnail Sources” to either:

“Not Any Image – SFT, WFI, YouTube, Random Thumb (if ON)**”
or
“All Sources – SFT, WFI, YouTube, Any Image, Random Thumb (if ON)”
or
“Not YouTube – SFT, WFI, Any Image, Random Thumb (if ON)”

Read the options instructions to decide which.

Remaining options determines formatting, image sizes, quality of image (for performance reasons) and if you want to use the free random thumbanil images.

What to set for these options is based on the site. If it was an autoblog for example you might want to set to “Auto and Featured Thumbnails ON**” and “All Sources – SFT, WFI, YouTube, Any Image, Random Thumb (if ON)” which would result in every post with an image showing a thumbnail, but it’s at the cost that some of the images loaded could be big (the any image bit) which is not ideal performance SEO wise.

For a site you spend a lot of time working on the SEO I would suggest “Featured Thumbnails Only ON” and “Not Any Image – SFT, WFI, YouTube, Random Thumb (if ON)**” and set a features image for every post.

These options will only show a thumbnail if you have set a Stallion Featured Image or a WordPress Featured Image both of which are from an SEO performance perspective smallish images. This does mean if you want all posts to have a thumbnail you have to either add a Stallion or a WordPress featured image, if you don’t set one, no image is shown.

The above is the best setting SEO wise because Stallion won’t look for any image or a Stallion random thumbnail, but means more work for you.

This is how I use Stallion Responsive on this site, I don’t have a home page archive, but you can see the setup on categories like WordPress SEO Tutorial. Every post under that category has a Stallion Featured Thumbnail set (set on the Edit Post page), so all the articles have a thumbnail.

BTW Took a look at how Zylyz WordPress Themes generate their thumbnails and in the preview theme they are using Timthumb.php which is the same way Stallion Responsive generates the smaller thumbnail images. However, Zylyz WordPress Themes do not (at least not in the preview theme) include the image quality option (it’s available within Timthumb), so using their themes means you can not decrease or increase the image quality. By default Timthumb sets quality to 75%, with Stallion Responsive you can set it to anything you like, on this site it’s set to 85% for example. No idea if with Zylyz WordPress Themes you can change the image dimensions (might be fixed at 200px by 200px), with Stallion you can set the width and height, on this site I’m using 150px by 150px.

David Law