Comment on Stallion WordPress SEO Theme by SEO Dave.

WordPress SEO Theme The Stallion 6.1 update is almost ready for release, in the process of testing on live WordPress sites where any major problems should occur on my sites rather than yours :-) Estimate a week or so for testing before making the update available assuming no major problems.

Stallion 6.1 is currently running on this site using one of the new theme colours (Black Stallion Gradients : scroll up and down this page and you’ll see the colour gradients) and one of the new layouts (right sidebar).

Stallion 6.1 has a lot of new features (I’ve honestly lost count how many!), Stallion 6.0.1 had around 185 options not including plugin addons, Stallion 6.1 has over 230 options and more built in plugins and addons to plugins. Like with Stallion 6.0.1 if you aren’t using a feature I’ve coded the theme so as few files as possible will load, so if you don’t use AdSense, Clickbank and Chitika for example NONE of the relevant files for the ad code, widgets etc… are loaded beyond the main Stallion options pages (it’s like they don’t exist as WordPress never loads them). This means even though Stallion 6.1 is feature rich it’s impact on server resources is minimized (obviously if you turned on every feature it will have an impact), this site for example is loading in under a second according to the built in queries footer info that only logged in users see (Stallion 6 built in feature to help find problems), this page is currently showing “75 queries in 0.738 seconds”.

This is the first update where aesthetics has been a major factor (I’m normally all about SEO :-)) and have included some interesting image relevant features including a background image uploader, 1000px by 288px header image based on the new TwentyEleven theme header image area : has all the TwentyEleven theme header image features including the 8 headers that comes with TwentyEleven. I’ve improved this header feature, like the Stallion rotating banners where there’s sets of images, I’ve incorporated a similar function in Stallion 6.1, with TwentyEleven you are limited to the 8 default images and one you upload, with Stallion you have multiple sets of 8 (I’ve included 10 empty custom folder sets, so you can add 80 of your own images on top of ones that will be packaged with Stallion) and the one you upload.

There’s even better thumbnail support, on top of the automated thumbnails you have with Stallion 6.0.1 that picks the last image added to a post you can select a specific image to be used as a thumbnail using TimThumb.php version 2 that automatically zooms and crops images to thumbnails : means you can upload for example a 660px by 300px image and have TimThumb automatically generate a thumbnail with whatever dimensions (180px by 120px for example) you choose via the Stallion options page.

There’s an image based navigation menu, add 5 posts to a custom menu, give those 5 posts a Featured image with dimensions 300px by 200px and with a little bit of fancy javascript they slide over one another and link to their respective posts.

Stallion 6.1 includes a built in Featured Posts Slideshow. You can see it in action on this site on the home page and archive pages. Upload a reasonable sized image (the right sidebar layout uses 660px by 300px wide images for the slideshow : doesn’t have to be exact, TimThumb.php generates the image on the fly) to a post and set it to featured and up to 20 posts can be added to the slideshow. This image will also be used for the thumbnail as well.

There’s loads more new features, I’ve documented most of them on their respective options pages.

David