Comment on Stallion WordPress SEO Theme by SEO Dave.

WordPress SEO Theme Short answer is no, it’s not better, framework themes have a lot of flexibility.

In the future I’d like to turn Stallion into a framework theme, it opens up new possibilities for user generated child themes and child themes can have new functionality not included in the main theme without having to edit the main theme files.

For the average user with no interest in creating their own child theme it won’t make a lot of difference, in fact the way I’ve designed the Stallion options pages is ideal for those who want a powerful theme with different styling, but don’t want to have to install extra addons (child themes) which is beyond a lot of users comfort level (Stallion is point and click and you have a new look).

There are currently 9 different theme styles in Stallion (not including the different headers and banners), that could be 9 different child themes in a framework theme. In Stallion it’s 9 stylesheets (CSS files) and 9 folders to hold the images for each style (only one of the 9 CSS files and image sets is loaded for each styling).

I plan to add more colour schemes and rewrote the code for this update to allow for a lot of flexibility in the output: plan is to add a single stylesheet and new image folder for each new style without having to edit the main template files at all (going to work on this in the next update). This will allow me to port in different theme looks without changing the Stallion core code, in the next update will add a few custom blank CSS files and image folders so users can create their own styles (same concept as the custom headers and custom banners) without having to edit the main themes files. So if you wanted a pink version of the general Talian style, you could copy the Red CSS files contents to one of the custom CSS files and the Red images to a custom image folder and change the CSS colour codes to pink and edit the images in a program like PhotoShop to make a pink version of the Talian styling.

Better you are at CSS, more you can achieve.

Long term I’d like the power of child themes as well as the simplicity of the current options pages. Best of both worlds :-)

BTW the above is about development value of framework themes, not how a theme works when setup. There is no WordPress theme that comes close to Stallion for SEO features, it is by far the best WordPress SEO theme guaranteed : no one will claim the $1,000 for finding a better WordPress SEO theme.

David

Update: Latest versions (3 years of development since writing the above) of Stallion are as good as any theme framework, in fact better in many respects because unlike with other WP frameworks, Stallion child themes can override ALL parent theme template files and CSS files, tends to be a pain to achieve this with other WordPress frameworks. Pop any Stallion template file or css file into a child theme and without any editing it overrides the parent template file: don’t think any other WordPress framework does this?