The Stallion Featured Post Slideshow was introduced in Stallion 6.1 and allows Stallion WordPress SEO Theme and Stallion Responsive theme users to feature posts on the Home and Archive pages (Categories, Tags etc…) via a WP image slideshow with an associated excerpt of the post with fancy javascript features like zooming and fading of the images (you can generate some cool effects). The Stallion Responsive theme version is also mobile responsive, the WP image slider resizes to fit the screen width. The tutorial below is for Stallion Responsive which has a few extra options over Stallion WordPress SEO (have tried to cover both themes, but the images are from Stallion Responsive). WordPress Slideshow Setup How to use the Stallion Featured […]
Continue Reading WordPress Featured Slideshow
Featured Posts Slideshow
I’m trying to get a proof of concept going and can’t get the 3 featured posts to slideshow. Can you give me an idea of what I’m doing wrong?
I originally made the mistake of using Picture Navigate custom menu to try to achieve this effect until I realised there was Featured Posts Slideshow.
I’ve ticked the “Use in Featured Slideshow” box in all 3 posts. I’ve set “Featured Posts Slideshow Number” to 3.
The images I’m using are smaller than recommended but the one showing is stretched big enough. Once the client okays the design he’ll buy the stock images at a high enough resolution.
I just added a picture and checked “Use in Featured Slideshow” for a fourth post, just in case it needed >3 posts, but the slideshow is still not sliding.
Any other ideas?
Thanks for the tutorial.
Featured Posts Slideshow
WordPress Featured Slideshow Bug Fix
Found the problem which I thought I’d resolved before release.
Setting to 3 shows 1 post, setting to 4 shows 3 posts, setting to 5 shows 4 posts, setting to 6 shows 5…
The fix is set the number to more than you need (10 for example) and only tick the “Use in Featured Slideshow” box in the 3 posts you want to be featured (which I assume you would do anyway :-)).
There is an argument having a number set in this feature is overkill since there’s no good reason why anyone would select say 10 posts as featured and set the slider to show 5.
Will get that fixed for the next release, might just remove that setting and hard code to 20.
BTW you aren’t selling Stallion sites without buying a separate Stallion ID for each domain you sell? Stallion is single user, you can use it on as many domains of yours as you like, but if you sell a domain the new owner needs to buy a Stallion ID : you or they can buy it through your Clickbank link so you get 50% of the sale price. If I find customers selling Stallion sites without buying an ID for each domain I can disable the ID.
David
Edit: Well that’s weird, the fix I added before release was what caused this issue. When I was building the slider when I set the number to say 5 there would be 6 posts shown, so subtracted 1 from everything (3 showed 5 so subtracted 2 from that) which fixed the issue. Now it’s working correctly with the fix taking 1 off (or 2 in the case of 3)! Must have been another issue that caused it not to work when I was building it and my fix broke working code :-)
WordPress Featured Slideshow Bug Fix
WordPress Bug Fix
It’s like the cover-up is worse than the crime, the fix is always what breaks the code.
Thanks for checking on the license, I am aware that my copy of Stallion is for my domains, but any I sell need new licenses. We’ve got the budget for a new license. And promoting through clickbank is one way of making a few bucks more.
Given I’ve decided to get good at Stallion configuration I figure may as well sell it bundled.
Stallion SEO is one seriously awesome theme. Especially once you get custom colours working. I’ll have to hack it a bit to make the colours fit the client brief this time, but it is cheaper and quicker than hunting through hundreds of themes or coding one up from scratch myself.
WordPress Bug Fix
WordPress Custom Colour Schemes
Sounds like a good plan, little advice.
Stallion has an update feature which means when I release the next update your customer could update over your customizations with a few clicks of the mouse if you’ve edited one of the built in colour schemes and not used a custom set! I advise using the custom style sheets so when an update is released your client doesn’t update over your code by mistake.
You can see an example of what you need to create for a custom colour under earlier comments about
Stallion Delicate Theme
Stallion Coraline Theme
Each comment includes a link to a zip file with the custom files, a css file and images.
In the next Stallion update (Stallion 6.1.1 which I’m working on) I’ve added those two colour schemes into the normal Stallion options pages, the above is a way for me to give between update colour schemes.
Those two colour schemes have some new styling not included in the other Stallion colour schemes: Tags at the bottom of posts include an image, Reply to comment link includes an image, the sidebar menu links image changes when hovered over, the comment submit button and search button (widget version) includes styling.
I was looking through the WordPress theme repository for new colour schemes and it’s surprising how popular relatively plain colour schemes are.
David
WordPress Custom Colour Schemes
WordPress Slider Image
Hello every one , would you show how to resize main template bigger then size 970px by 300px
WordPress Featured Slideshow Height and Width
Not that long ago I worked on the Stallion Featured Slideshow code and already forgot what all the parts are, had to look them up :-)
The file
/stallion-seo-theme/layout/featured-slideshow.php
Has the main image sizes for the Stallion Featured Slideshow.
For example this code sets the sizes for the no sidebar layout:
if (st_sidebar_lo() == '1000') { $st_feature_thumb_width = 970; }; $st_feature_thumb_height = 300;You could change the height ($st_feature_thumb_height) to 400 for example.
You also have to edit the CSS file for the layout used, if using the no sidebar layout (100px wide) edit the file
/stallion-seo-theme/style-1000.css
Find (near the bottom)-
#st_feature-wrap{ height:302px; width:972px; margin:10px auto 60px auto; } #st_feature { border: 1px solid; } #st_feature #st_feature_content{ height:300px; }You’ll need to set the height and width to take into account your new sizes added to the other file.
If you want a height of 400px for example you’d change the first height to 402px and the second one to 400px.
Changing the width would be harder because the width set is based on the width of the layout used, maximised to fit basically (using as much space as possbile for the layout). You could make the widths smaller than those currently set, making them wider would ruin what the theme looks like.
If you use another Stallion layout edit the CSS file that’s used for that layout. style-200l200l.css is the double left 200px wide sidebars for example.
I think that’s it.
David
WordPress Featured Slideshow Height and Width
WordPress Slideshow with Header Images
One feature I like about the Stallion SEO theme is it has a slide show. Is there anyway to make that slide show be the header?
For example, if my website has a big fat 2012 WordPress header with say five images. On the lower right hand corner, for example, there will be clickable arrows so people can manually scroll the header images.
If you have an e-shop this would be useful as you could narrate a sales story with a sequence of imagines that are not flashying or changing but rather empower the user to page through them. For example, I could show my analytics before and after the Stallion theme starts taking effect if I was promoting the Stallion theme.
WordPress Slideshow with Header Images
WordPress Featured Image Static Slideshow
I don’t think the current Stallion 2011 Header code which is based on the WordPress default TwentyEleven theme code would be adaptable to something like that.
The Stallion 2011 header image feature basically uses a set of 8 images that can be randomly selected, but always links to the home page. If a large WordPress Featured Image is associated with a post it will be used for the Stallion 2011 header image. So there’s no setting of linking to say 5 posts with a next/previous button set.
The Stallion Featured Posts Slideshow is close to what you want, the only problem is the positioning it currently only works as you want with the no sidebars layout.
To stop the slideshow from sliding to the next image set “Slideshow Timing” to a very high number, it won’t change image until the next/previous arrows are clicked or the user waits a very long time.
When I was designing the slideshow feature I thought about having it as full width for all layouts (would have been easier to code), basically would be like the no sidebars layout for all layouts with no resizing.
Shouldn’t be too difficult to add a new option where the slider goes below the header area, since you can already set the slider timer high effectively turning it off and can already turn off the header area might be able to have this for the next Stallion release by adding a new option in the update.
David
Update: above is built into the latest version of Stallion Responsive.
WordPress Featured Image Static Slideshow
WordPress Image Slideshow
The featured slideshow is one of the best aesthetic features in Stallion. I like the shuffle for the transition for example.
Is there a way to turn off the link/excerpt in the lower left hand corner?
Just have the pure image.
If you can not, that’s fine the feature is great.
WordPress Featured Slideshow Images Only
That should be easy to achieve.
Edit
/stallion-seo-theme/layout/featured-slideshow.php
And delete the lines
That should leave the image and the clickable previous and next buttons area.
Will add an option next update to turn that part of the slider off. Nice idea.
David
WordPress Featured Slideshow Images Only
WordPress SlideShow Not Working
Hi,
I already changes the permission for “cache” folder but still not work . FYI I’m using Hawk Host Hosting , please advice , thanks
WordPress Theme Featured Slideshow
That’s not enough information to determine the problem.
URL of the site, what are you seeing, error messages, have you set Stallion Thumbnails for the posts you want to be part of the slideshow and ticked the use in the slideshow under those posts edit pages, have your turned slideshow on under the Stallion options????
The cache permissions is only part of the setup, that’s so specific sized images are generated to save bandwidth. Did you try 755, 775 and 777? Are other thumbnails working (if thumbnails features are turned on), if so it’s not a cache issue. You can also use FTP to look inside the cache folder, are there files present, if you are using a Stallion feature that generates thumbnails there will be files in the cache folder, which would mean you had to have set the permissions correctly.
David
WordPress Theme Featured Slideshow
WP Featured Slideshow Not Working
David ,
I already turn on featured slideshow option on stallion and also tick on the post, already change all the permission 755,775,777 and still not working , and there are no files on cache dir, please advice thanks
WordPress Slideshow Jquery Conflict
Viewing source of your home page and I see Jquery 1.7.2 which is clashing with Jquery min 1.7.1 that the Stallion slideshow uses.
Jquery 1.7.2 will be loaded by one of your plugins, don’t know which. You have two choices find and deactivate the plugin that clashes with the Stallion slideshow feature or deactivate the slideshow.
David
WordPress Slideshow Broken
David,
I already found the plugins and deactivated it but still not work , please advice , thanks
WordPress Featured Thumbnails
Have you edited at least one post, added a Stallion Featured Thumbnail and ticked the Use In Featured Slideshow tick box? I ask because viewing source of your home page doesn’t show any featured posts in the code. Even if a plugin was interacting with Jquery the code should still load, which suggests you haven’t set any posts to be featured.
If you have set featured posts link to the post so I can confirm a Stallion Featured Thumbnail is associated with that post and Stallion thumbnail support is working correctly. You can check yourself, go to a category the post is in and check if it’s got the Stallion Featured Thumbnail as the thumbnail on the category page, if the thumbnail is set correctly you’ll see it.
David
WordPress Featured Thumbnails
WordPress Slideshow Working Now
David ,
its working now :D thanks a lot , please review
WordPress Slideshow Plugin Conflicts
When I have problems with anything in WP, and want to troubleshoot, I unplug all my plugins and add-ons.
I think WP-Polls might conflict with the slideshow for example.
There is no way anyone can anticipate all the endless interactions of interactions between code and plugins.
So this is one idea.
WP Slideshow Not Working
Mark ,
thanks for your advice , will do that right now
Stallion SEO Theme Featured Posts Slideshow
(Kudos for your theme – just getting my brain around it …)
Featured Posts Slideshow
As the title indicates “Posts Slideshow” this only works with posts.
1. Can I get it to work with pages too?
2. How can I get it to work with pages(!) too?
3. If not, what Slideshow do you recommend?
BTW, I now suddenly feel, I have to check every additional plugin with you. I suppose there are no objections to using WP Super Cache?
Thanks a lot for your time and patience!
delta
Stallion SEO Theme Featured Posts Slideshow
Stallion Featured Posts Slideshow
The Stallion Featured Posts Slideshow works with Posts only, so no option to use Pages.
That being said with all the built in features of Stallion there’s not a lot of difference between a Post and Page if you know what you are doing :-)
Before ruling out using the Featured Posts Slideshow feature on a site why are the articles you want to use in the featured slideshow created as Pages and not Posts?
The main difference between a Post and Page in other WordPress themes is with Pages you can select Page templates, this isn’t the case for Stallion, the Page templates are available to Posts as well. The main difference between a Stallion static Page and a blog Post is a Page isn’t linked into the archive type sections of a site (not added to Categories, Tags etc…). Output wise there’s not really any difference, the differences are minor and activating the right Stallion features means what is unique about static Pages in other themes can be used on Posts as well.
Wouldn’t be that difficult to add some Post to a Category you hide (Stallion feature) so it’s not linked from archives (would be linked from the home page if it uses archived posts) and build a custom menu to link to those posts so they have links to them. When setting up widgets exclude the post from that Category (Stallion feature). That would give you Posts that are are a lot like Pages.
It it were me I’d turn the Pages into Posts so I could use them as long as changing them didn’t damage the links structure.
I’ve not used a slideshow plugin I’d recommend, most have big SEO mistakes, the Stallion slideshow takes SEO into account.
Like most themes, Stallion will work with most plugins, I use WP SuperCache on my sites for example. Problem is there’s a lot of plugins and themes for that matter that cause SEO damage so should be avoided.
It’s why I add so many plugins into Stallion, if a plugin has SEO mistakes (or features missing) that I really want to use I rewrite the plugin code to fix the mistakes and mash other Stallion features together, since I don’t want to maintain and support a dozen plus derivative plugins that only work with Stallion makes sense to have them as built in plugins only Stallion users can use.
When an original plugin is working how I want it to work there’s no reason to edit the code or include it with Stallion, WP SuperCache for example works, no reason to edit the code or add it to Stallion, there’s also other plugins that work like WP SuperCache, wouldn’t want to lock a user into what I use without a very good reason. I added the All In One SEO Pack Plugin to Stallion with significant code and feature additions, truth is All In One is a simple plugin that was easy to adapt to my needs. Yoast WordPress SEO in comparison has a few features I’d like to add to Stallion, but it wouldn’t be suitable as a base for a Stallion built in plugin, has too many features I wouldn’t add to Stallion.
David
Stallion Featured Posts Slideshow
Stallion Featured Posts Slideshow
Well, I used pages because I believe they used to be handed out as static html pages once, but that might be a long time ago and of course I might be wrong :(
I’m not a programmer – would it be very difficult to include pages in the Stallion Featured Posts Slideshow aswell? Maybe next update?
As for my current situation – all is setup and well – I probably choose a workaround and write some “featured” teasers as posts and link them to those pages.
Thanks
delta
Stallion Featured Posts Slideshow
WordPress Featured Pages Slideshow
Including Pages in the Stallion Featured Posts Slideshow would require a fair amount of code changes, so not easy, I have no plans to include Pages in a future update.
If you must use Pages I’d look for a slideshow plugin.
You are wrong about static Pages ever being treat differently to blog Posts, everything WordPress generates is dynamic. Basically Google looks at the filename and guesses if it’s dynamic or not (no way to tell for sure).
If Googlebot see .html, .htm, / it’s going to assume static HTML, if it sees .php, .asp etc… without variables (lacks ?) I’d expect Googlebot to assume it’s static.
If Googlebot sees variables it’s definitely dynamic and spidering is meant to be slightly slowed.
Reality is it’s all irrelevant, Google only slows the spidering of dynamic pages a small amount so they don’t crash sites with millions of URLs, so the gain is marginal at best (nothing to worry about).
Stallion generates dynamic URLs if you use the Stallion SEO Super Comments feature, see the links at the bottom right corner of large comments (like this one) there’s links to pages like the URL includes “?cid=24929” (that’s a variable Comment ID, dynamic URL).
Remember there are plugins to convert static Pages into blog Posts, if you go that route make sure the URL doesn’t change. If you set your permalinks to something like .html you shouldn’t convert Pages into Posts because you’ll loose the .html. The only permalinks structure that works is /%postname%/ if that’s not your current Custom URL DO NOT change Pages into Posts.
David
WordPress Featured Pages Slideshow
WordPress Pages or WordPress Posts
I’ve been thinking and now come to the conclusion that there’s really no need for pages. It’s just my old way of thinking. And of course you’re right: I can achieve the very same with posts.
Structure is what I’m looking for, and so I can easily create on set of top level cats that serve the purpose of a vertical hierarchy and ad tags to render the horizontal connections
As my new site still isn’t online, I can easily change all to posts – just a little work :o
Thanks!
ps your notification (via email) system doesn’t work …
WordPress Pages or WordPress Posts
Subscribe to Comments Reloaded Plugin
Forgot to update Gurken Subscribe to Comments Plugin (depreciated) to Subscribe to Comments Reloaded Plugin which works and has more features.
Disadvantages of running about 90 WordPress installs, easy to miss something important :-)
Also changed the email address to my Gmail account as the seo-gold.com one might get marked as SPAM.
Thanks for letting me know comment notifications wasn’t working, if you didn’t receive the original double opt in email you should subscribe again (more options now).
David
Subscribe to Comments Reloaded Plugin
Subscribe to Comments Reloaded Plugin SEO Damage
This is what I hate about using WordPress plugins, so much potential for SEO damage.
The “subscribe” without commenting link passes link benefit. This means every post with comments enabled has a link wasting link benefit.
The subscribe to pages has the following SEO mistakes.
A meta name=’robots’ content=’noindex,nofollow’
What this means is the link benefit passed via the subscribe link is completely wasted. A best case scenario should be
meta name=’robots’ content=’noindex,follow’
or just
meta name=’robots’ content=’noindex’
We don’t want these pages indexed, they add nothing to the site, but we don’t want the links from these pages nofollowed, at least we can recover some of the link benefit by following the links from these pages, this would at least recover around 85% of the lost link benefit.
Broken canonical URL
Should be
or you could get away with
The current canonical URL is completely broken.
To Google a canonical URL is a 301 redirect that doesn’t redirect in the browser. Google sends the link benefit hitting the page to the canonical URL minus a small dampening factor (having a canonical or 301 redirect costs a small amount of PR, I assume around 15%).
Looks like I’m editing another plugin for SEO reasons :-(
What I’ll probably do since it’s just for my sites (I might upload it for other stallion users as well) is turn the subscription link into post forms with CSS styling to look like a text link like Stallion uses for author comment links so no link benefit is even sent to the subscribe pages, remove the nofollow code and see if I can fix the canonical URL.
David
Subscribe to Comments Reloaded Plugin SEO Damage
Same canonical problem
Hi David,
I’ve got the exact same problem with canonical link as you had.
Could you please tell me how you resolved it.
Thanks in advance!
Subscribe to Comments Reloaded Plugin Broken Canonical URLs
My comment was from 2012, I’d forgot all about it.
I don’t know if I fixed the Subscribe to Comments Reloaded Plugin Broken Canonical URLs PHP code at the time (I modify a LOT of plugins), but right now (I still use the plugin) the canonicals are still broken. So if I did fix it I’ve long since lost the code fix.
I do recall my solution to the subscribe text links passing SEO benefit, I develop the Stallion Responsive theme code and it includes a built in javascript based link cloaking script, so I converted the “Subscribe” text link to a cloaked link which Google doesn’t see as a text links.
Users with javascript enabled see a text link which takes them to the subscribe page, but Google just sees the text “subscribe” and doesn’t pass link benefit. I also added a noindex meta tag to the output as well.
Since no link benefit flows from the Subscribe links and the pages aren’t indexed I didn’t have to worry about the broken canonical URLs. Ideally they’d be fixed by the plugin developer.
If you use Stallion Responsive and want to use the link cloaking script it’s under “Stallion SEO Theme” >> “Advanced SEO Options” : “Cloak Affiliate Links”.
When either these options are set:
Cloak Affiliate Links JS File ON
Cloak Affiliate Links Inline JS ON
You can modify the Subscribe to Comments Reloaded Plugin options like I use.
Under “StCR” >> “Comment Form” change “Messages for your visitors – Default label” to
Notify me of followup comments via e-mail. You can also <span class='affst' title='tests' id='[subscribe_link]'>subscribe</span> without commenting.There are other links in the other options you could change, but they aren’t shown to Google so no reason to cloak them.
To add the noindex tag:
Under “StCR” >> “Management Page” change “Custom HEAD meta” to
<meta name='robots' content='noindex'>If you aren’t a Stallion Responsive theme user the second option change will at least noindex those webpages, but you’ll still be passing link benefit through the subscribe links.
I suppose you could steal my link cloaking script, it’s this code:
It’s the content of the “/stallion-responsive/js/links.js” file:
function hasClass(e, c) {if (typeof e === "string") e = document.getElementById(e);
var classes = e.className;
if (!classes) return false;
if (classes === c) return true;
return e.className.search("\\b" + c + "\\b") !== -1;
};
function affLnks(){
var theURL, theAnchorText, theTitle, theId;
var spans = document.getElementsByTagName('span');
for (var i = 0; i<spans.length; i++){
if (hasClass(spans[i], 'testing|affst')){
theAnchorText = spans[i].innerHTML;
theTitle = spans[i].title.toLowerCase().replace(/^\s+|\s+$/g,"");
theId = spans[i].id.replace(/^\s+|\s+$/g,"");
switch (theTitle) {
case 'tests': theURL = ''; break;
case 'tests2': theURL = 'https://stallion-theme.co.uk/go/go.php?id='; break;
case 'testing': theURL = 'https://stallion-theme.co.uk/go/go.php?id='; break;
case 'testing2': theURL = 'https://stallion-theme.co.uk/go/go.php?id='; break;
case 'outbound': theURL = 'https://stallion-theme.co.uk/go/go.php?id='; break;
case 'outboundz': theURL = 'https://stallion-theme.co.uk/go/go.php?id='; break;
default: theURL = '/#';
}
spans[i].innerHTML = '<a target="_blank" href="' + theURL + '' + theId + '" class="' + spans[i].className + '">' + theAnchorText + '</a>';
spans[i].removeAttribute('title');
}
}
}
window.onload = function(){
affLnks();
};
It basically converts the contents of a span tag with a specific CSS class to be served as a text link (the ID contents is the URL) using javascript. The list of cases are CSS classes I’ve used with a redirection link script (the /go/go.php file linked above) I use for affiliate links. You can safely delete the 5 lines with the Stallion Theme URLs: they areonly used for span tags with the relevant CSS classes like “outboundz”.
Basic usage is replace a standard text link with this code:
<span class='affst' title='tests' id='URL-HERE'>ANCHOR-TEXT-HERE</span>When the above javascript is installed (like with Stallion Responsive) the javascript converts the span tag to a clickable link.
For advanced use (for affiliate links say) use something like this:
<span class='affst' title='outboundz' id='1'>ANCHOR-TEXT-HERE</span>Modify the javascript “case ‘outboundz’: theURL = ‘https://stallion-theme.co.uk/go/go.php?id=’; break;” to use your script (change the script URL) and change the id=”1″ to whatever code the the script uses: the script I use uses numbers 1,2,3,4,5… The above code basically creates this link https://stallion-theme.co.uk/go/go.php?id=1 which is a WPRobot plugin affiliate link.
David Law
Subscribe to Comments Reloaded Plugin Broken Canonical URLs