Comment on Stallion Responsive WordPress SEO Theme by SEO Dave.

Stallion WordPress SEO Package Almost ready to release Stallion Responsive 8.1, need a week to upload to my sites and test to make sure nothing is broken.

Added a cool set of widget features primarily for building magazine/news type front pages, but it’s so much more than that.

On the WordPress Technical Support page about two paragraphs down you’ll see two widgets within the content.

There’s no widget areas (a widget area is where you drag and drop widgets to under “Appearance” >> “Widgets”) in the center of a post, this is added via a widget shortcode (part of Stallion 8.1) which can be used to add entire widget areas anywhere.

<div class="sidebar-box">
SEO Tutorial
    WordPress SEO
    
</div>

    Simplest use is as you see in the post above, paste a shortcode (see code above), go to “Appearance” >> “Widgets” and drag and drop which ever widgets you want in that shortcodes widget area.

    You’ll note the two widgets are side by side which isn’t default WordPress behavior (widget stack in vertical lines filling the entire horizontal space available). To achieve this added the ability to set widgets with relative widths which allows for widgets to be added in rows.

    With this new Stallion feature you can add up to 6 widgets in a row, I have two in the example post above. Each widget can have a width that’s a fraction of the available horizontal space: 1/2th, 1/3rd, 1/4, 1/5, 1/6, 2/3, 3/4, 2/5, 3/5, 4/5, 5/5 and 5/6th.

    In the example each widget is set to use 1/2th : since there’s two widgets 1/2th + 1/2th = 1 so fills all the horizontal space. Could have 1/3 : 1/3 : 1/3 or 1/2 : 1/4 : 1/4 or 2/3 : 1/3 and the entire space would be used (don’t have to use it all, could have 1/2 : 1/4 and leave a gap).

    Also added end of row widgets so a widget area can have multiple rows of widget.

    1/3 : 1/3 : 1/3 : endrow
    1/2 : 1/4 : 1/4 : endrow

    That would be two rows of widgets in one widget area.

    Added a spacer widget as well for if you want an empty space between widgets.

    1/3 : spacer 1/3 : 1/3 : endrow
    1/2 : 1/4 : 1/4 : endrow

    The above would be two rows of widgets with the 2nd widget being an empty space 1/3rd the width of the horizontal space. Or as below have two widgets with 1/6th of the space either side empty.

    spacer 1/6 : 1/3 : 1/3 : spacer 1/6 : endrow

    Added a vertical padding endrow widget that acts as an endrow widget (as above) and adds 20px of vertical space between widgets. If you wanted the earlier widget setup, but with 40px padding between the two rows:

    1/3 : spacer 1/3 : 1/3 : endrowpad : endrowpad
    1/2 : 1/4 : 1/4 : endrow

    As you can see the possibilities are unlimited.

    ALL multiwidgets (widgets you can use multiple times) can have their width set, so will work with the default WordPress widgets, most Stallion widgets (some aren’t multiwidget) and most widgets you can find as part of plugins.

    That’s what you can do with one widget area added to a post as a shortcode. What could you achieve with unlimited dynamic widget areas? New feature to create widget areas on the fly, want 10 new widget areas to use as shortcodes, just list how many you want (new Stallion options page) and use their respective shortcodes anywhere you like.

    Means you could build complex front pages for magazine/news style sites, in my simple example I linked to above I’ve added the Stallion SEO Posts widget twice (it’s a multiwidget). The first widget I’ve set to 5 popular posts from the SEO Tutorial category only. The second widget same setup, but only from the category WordPress SEO Tutorial. The Stallion SEO Posts widget has new options in Stallion 8.1 to set which of the posts should have text links, thumbnail images and excerpts. For those example widgets they are set to all 5 popular posts should show a text link, but only post 1 should show a thumbnail image and an excerpt.

    These are an awesome set of features. The above features are inspired by Fox News http://www.foxnews.com/ wanted to be able to mimic the front page layout of their news categories. Unlike Fox News the Stallion Responsive output is mobile responsive**

    ** Not decided exactly what to do with the widths for smaller screen widths yet, just have to create some mobile CSS rules to resize in small devices. Don’t want a 1/6th widget to be 1/6th the width of the screen if the screen is only 300px wide. So will add some minimum widths to force the widgets to go vertical.

    David