Comment on Stallion Responsive WordPress SEO Theme by SEO Dave.

Stallion WordPress SEO Package Working on a really cool set of layout and widget features for Stallion Responsive v8.1 that takes WordPress widgets to another level.

Decided I want to take Stallion in the News themes and Magazine themes direction without damaging the SEO and keep it responsive of course. After looking at news sites and magazine types sites, seems the layout isn’t that special, just media rich content and with WordPress news themes and magazine themes tends to be just for the home page layout.

My first thought was a set of WordPress Page templates, could build templates with new widget areas built in that output content in particular ways: maybe a front page template with 4 widgets areas in the main content, another page template with one widget area that uses half the page and two widget areas that use a quarter each.

With enough page templates and new widget areas the combination layouts are unlimited, BUT means a LOT of forward planning on my part. Lots of new page templates that do pretty much the same thing other than which widget areas are loaded and each page template would need it’s own unique widget areas: could means dozens of new widget areas most users will never use.

What I really needed was the ability to generate new widget areas on the fly and insert them into any WordPress Post or Page and/or insert them into any WordPress Page template file. With this option wouldn’t need any new widget areas and though I could build new page templates because Stallion has the ability to use a page template on any post/pages, could use any of the current templates without code modification.

Issue solved. Stallion Responsive 8.1 includes a widget area shortcode feature, create an unlimited number of widget areas (on an options page), add widgets to those widget areas (as you would add a widget normally) and either insert the widget areas into a Post/Page (directly in the content, as content) using a WordPress shortcode or include it in a WordPress Page template file (edit a template file, add some code).

Only thing missing from this feature is an easy way to copy n paste the shortcode into a Post, right now it’s copy the code from an options page, would like to have it as a button on the edit Posts screen (will see if I can get that done next).

The above in itself is a cool feature, adding widgets areas (which means adding widgets) in any post/page on the fly is really useful, but the widget areas are all full content width in size: if the posts content is 640px the widget area is 640px which means you can’t generate the page template layouts I mentioned above.

I needed a way to set the width of a widget as a percentage of the full width allowing for having widgets filling say ~50% of the content widget (could have 2 side by side).

Issues solved. Can set the width of all widgets that have options (there’s some basic Stallion widgets that lack options) to a variety of sizes.

The widget width sizes are

Full width
1/2 width
1/3 width
2/3 width
1/4 width
3/4 width
1/5 width
2/5 width
3/5 width
4/5 width
1/6 width
5/6 width

The width is a fraction of the container width, if set to 1/2 and the main container (for example the main content area) is 640px wide, that widget uses ~1/2 or 50% of the width (not precisely 50%, it’s actually 48% there’s a small margin added).

For those not too good at fractions the above covers up to 6 widgets in a row, you can break the width of the screen up into a maximum 6 chunks. With the 1,000px Stallion layout for example the main content is about 970px, you could have up to 6 widgets in a line each with a width around 160px. That’s also true for the current full screen widget areas: forgot to mention these widths work with all widget areas (left and right sidebar for example) not just the ones created on the fly, you could add 6 widgets in a line below your header or above the footer without having to create a new widget area.

For the Stallion layout I’m using on this website (main content is 640px wide) breaking into 6 might be a bit narrow, would only be around 115px per widget (might work for a set of small image ads in a line). A more interesting layout might be three widgets in a row with options 1/2, 1/4, 1/4 : 320px, 160px, 160px, that could be a 300px AdSense ad plus a couple of Stallion SEO Posts widgets loading popular posts from two different categories. Or 1/4. 1/2, 1/4 : 160px, 320px, 160px. or 2/3, 1/3 : 420px, 210px.

This allows for a lot of flexibility, if content can be added to a widget, it can be added to any WordPress Post or Page with whatever size you set it at.

Also added separator/divider widgets so one widget area could be used to build a front page with lines of widgets using different widgets, could add one widget area to a post and on the “Appearance” >> “Widgets” page add 10+ widgets to that widget area and it would only load for that posts:

1/2 : 1/4 : 1/4
New Line Divider
2/3 : 1/3
New Line Divider
Full width
New Line Divider
…

I can see this being quite addictive building pages with interesting layouts from widgets. Just from an ad perspective this is interesting.

Not got the responsive CSS code sorted yet, but the main feature is done.

Hmm, how the month passes when you get caught up on feature development, almost half way through July and plan to finish this update this month! Have dozens of ideas and features to still create.

David