Updated for Stallion Responsive 8.5 (October 2016). Within this part of the Stallion Responsive Tutorial Series we will take a look at one of the main Stallion Responsive SEO Package options pages, the Stallion Responsive Layout Options Page accessed under “Stallion Theme” >> “Layout Options”. The Stallion Responsive WordPress SEO Package includes a LOT of layout/design options, I’m not exaggerating when I say a LOT, I don’t think you’ll find another WordPress theme with this many layout and WordPress design options. With Stallion Responsive you can turn on/off almost everything via a tick box that with most themes would require hacking the themes code. Having so many layout and design options is great, there’s not a lot you CAN’T do […]
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WordPress RSS Optin Form
David,
Is it possible to put an opt-in box on my Talian/Stallion home pages similar to your Submit box for your “Stallion Theme List” (upper right corner of this page) that adds a person to my RSS feed and collects there email address?
I know you can be subscribe with the “Entries RSS” key but I’m thinking a submit box might work better for my purposes.
Thanks,
Randy
WordPress RSS Optin Form
Aweber Form WordPress Widget
I’ve not tried what you want to do, so no idea. The Stallion theme List is an Aweber form, so not part of WordPress, added it via a Text Widget.
I’d look for WordPress plugins that fulfill what you want.
David
WP Theme Options
HI, new user here, How do I start editing options.
How do I get to the Stalion layout options page?
Cant find it on the left side menu of WP when I log in as admin.
WordPress SEO Theme Options
The Stallion SEO Theme options pages are on the left menu under the Appearance menu.
If you click the “Stallion Theme” left menu link all Stallion theme options pages are shown on the left menu.
David
WordPress Post Excerpts
Hi Dave,
I am using the Stallion theme template for the first time and ran into a snag. The first 2 posts I have published have come up as excerpts on the website. The excerpt box is not checked on the screen options. I am assuming that is the default on the Stallion theme. I have spent hours trying to change it to a full post. Is there something I’m missing on the dashboard.
Any advice you can give me would be greatly appreciated.
Cheers,
Adam (Newbie)
WordPress Post Excerpts
WordPress Excerpts vs Full Post Content
Having excerpts on the archive sections of a WordPress site is an important Stallion SEO feature.
If you show the full post content on archive pages you run the risk of generating duplicate content pages. By using excerpts the chances of a duplicate content problem is significantly reduced.
That being said there’s a plugin called SEO Post Teaser that you can get for free from WordPress SEO Plugins.
Using the Post Teaser plugin you can set the excerpt to any size you like up to the full post. The plugin also allows for richer content than the basic WordPress excerpt. The concept is to take a reasonable amount of the content, but not all of it so you don’t generate duplicate content problems.
David
WordPress Excerpts vs Full Post Content
Post Excerpts on WordPress Pages
Hey David,
I’m a bit of a WordPress newbie, so bare with me on this… By the way, my site after 2 days of being live is ranking very well – Gracias!!
I felt like I needed to create custom theme templates for my pages, “home” and “pageofposts” I set Home to be a partially static page and am working to have “recent posts” below that with a brief excerpt – right now I can get a titel summary. I basically took page.php and added the widget (as best I can remember!!).
On the other menu pages, my category posts related to the page via “custom fields” works nicely, but it shows the entire post, and I’d like them to be excerpts. I tried adding “add_post_type_support( ‘page’, ‘excerpt’ );” to functions.php, but all that does is print “add_post_type_support( ‘page’, ‘excerpt’ );” on the page
How do I accomplish these? Many thanks!
Post Excerpts on WordPress Pages
WP the_content and the_excerpt
Ok, I’m figuring it out. Had to get into the template and change template tag “the_content()” “to the_excerpt(” where the posts are called for the in page template.
Now if i can figure out how to do it to call recent posts excerpts for the home page (and with thumbnail images too – this stuff is addicting!!).
WordPress Recent Posts Excerpts
Hey David,
I’m back to the home page issue again, where I’d like to have static content in the body and recent post excerpts below. I figured a few things out since my last post, but I’m still confused at this moment.
By doing this, will this mess up the ad arrangements? I’m not concerned about ads right now as I’m just building content and my rankings, but i don’t want to end up hosing myself down the road.
WordPress Recent Posts Excerpts
WordPress Static Page Template with Recent Posts
If I’ve understood you correctly you want to use a static front page with recent posts as well.
I took a crack at putting something together (a page template with archives), but adding archives to a Page template didn’t work.
Try this.
Create a Post (not a Page) with the content you want on the home page.
Set the post to Format “Image” (the Image format shows the full content not an excerpt on archive pages).
Set the post as a Sticky post by clicking the Visibility “Edit” link and click “Stick this post to the front page”
If you have your home page set to the default layout
Settings >> Reading : Front page displays – “Your latest posts”
The post you made a Sticky post will be at the top in full and the most recent posts will show as excerpts below (assuming you haven’t used any of the post Formats that use more than an excerpt).
Doing the above will kind of give you what you want, though if you wanted comments on the home page that will be missing. Also the post will exist, so will be loaded in full on the home page and the post page, will also be shown in full on the category (and any tags) it was added to. If you don’t want that content as a separate post you could add a 301 redirect to the home page in your.htaccess file so when visitors click the link to the post they are redirected to the home page and Google etc… won’t index it.
David
WordPress Static Page Template with Recent Posts
Google SERPs
Awesome David, thanks much for the response. I’ll work on that tomorrow for sure. FYI, the site is cranking up the SERPs, I’m already in the top 25 on the 4 major keyword phrases, and I haven’t even got the site half-loaded with content yet.
Unreal (seems to me anyways!!).
WordPress Sticky Posts
Thanks for turning me onto that David, the sticky works like a charm. As far an excerpts go, I just found out the “more” button on the post editor to control the post excerpts.
I’m sure there is a way to automate excerpting by editing the template that controls the home page – any ideas which template that is? I’ve been able to copy page.php and edit it to do that for other main pages i’ve created.
WordPress Sticky Posts
WordPress Archives Post Excerpts
Stallion by default uses excerpts on all archives except when you use the formats (like Image) that doesn’t use the excerpt.
If you have a home page with 10 archives posts that’s the index.php file, if you have a static front page it’s the page.php file.
The index.php uses the content-***.php files for the individual archives, if you select standard format it uses content.php if you select Image it’s content-image.php
Had a look at your site and you might find a combination of using the Sticky post I suggested before with the Post Teaser plugin that’s free from WordPress SEO Plugins.
The Post Teaser Plugin adds an excerpt of posts with richer content, so it will show images etc… If you had a Sticky post using say the Image format and the Post Teaser plugin with a relatively short excerpt it would result in what you are after and automated.
The above will work with making no code changes to Stallion :-)
David
WordPress Archives Post Excerpts
Theme Footer Links
The footer link option for things like privacy policy and contact etc is a welcome feature to this SEO theme. However, one small change could be made in the future is a small chance in the CSS. The issue now is if the link titles are too long it will stack the links vertically, rather than run them across horizontally.
If on some of your sites you have things like comment policy and a lot of other small housekeeping links it could push this to be vertically stacked. It is a minor CSS think but maybe something you might want to check.
Oh one last question there was an issue someone mentioned way back about the Facebook promotion code causing funny results as seen in Google Analytics, like duplicate content? I do not know if you recall and was this code changed? It was something with FB not your theme but there was a work arround. If you need more details let me know.
This SEO theme is really the best and now that I am settle a bit in my sunny Florida place, I need to see if I can market your theme a little.
I tend to repeat myself so forgive me for being like a broken record. I have played with bbPress, Mingle and BuddyPress a bit, but they all have pluses and minuses for starting a community site, mostly spam, clutter, database issues and complexity and people do not like to ‘sign up’. To date your Stallion theme has been the best to get people coming back to my sites. I am trying to make a breakthrough as to how this theme could be extended even more in a simple streamline way to make it useful to the users so they comeback and back. Anyway thanks for all your hard work. I do not know if I would be in sunny Florida without your efforts.
Theme Footer Links
WordPress Theme Footer Links
The footer links CSS code is designed to show the links in a line one after each other with no list styling, when the line runs out of space it wraps to the next line, basically the same as the text in this comment. The footer menu is really designed for one line of links because there’s not a lot of space available, had to increase the size of the footer area a little on some of the Stallion colour schemes to fit one line in.
Most of the Stallion colour options have the footer links CSS code centered matching the other links within the footer, think it’s a couple of the new ones are right aligned.
For the footer links that are centered if you have links anchor text that does need more than one line it will wrap and center the text, if you don’t plan your footer links anchor text you could get a full line of links and a couple of words from the last link on the next line which wouldn’t look very good.
If you are seeing something else first try CTRL F5 to make sure you aren’t using cached CSS files, if that doesn’t help you could email me a screenshot as you might be seeing something I don’t see.
You can edit the anchor text of links within a WordPress navigation menu, so possible to fit more links on one line by reducing the words used.
The Facebook code can be an issue for some users, my wife had a site with a plugin that forced the site out of frames (was to stop Google images not loading the site, no AdSense revenue if the page doesn’t load and Google images only shows the image) and the plugin code was interacting with the buggy Facebook code causing a redirect loop in Internet Explorer only. I tried the bug fixes I found online at the time, but if I remember correctly they didn’t work. I’ve not checked Facebook developer site recently to see if they’ve fixed the bugs?
On the community aspect of blogs I’m with you 100%, if you create a site that users want to come back to day after day you’ve got a successful site. Funnily enough my jokes site is like that, but it’s a bunch of racists trashing each other rather than a real community!
Have you looked at the new recent comments page template I added to Stallion 6.2?
Example Latest 25 Comment Discussions, I’ll probably improve the output in a later update, would like to pull in the title comments and the ability to click a Reply to Link directly from that page. If I could get a comment form on that page to post the comments to the correct article etc… it would make the page a place for regular visitors to contribute to threads without having to load the article the comments are on: got a feeling that’s going to be hard to code.
David
WordPress Theme Footer Links
How to Turn a WordPress Blog into a Social Network
Here is an idea on how to turn the WordPress SEO theme into more of a social network without BBpress, Mingle or BuddyPress which all have the disadvantage of resistration. I can count on my left hand the number of posts on websites I belong to that I need to registart. In contrast I comment on a number of blogs I follow wth ease.
Here is the idea to make the highly SEOed Stallion theme a social network
When you hover over someone’s Gravatar, you could have a cloud appear that says ‘expand Mark’s profile’. This would simply do three things.
1) Perhaps make their Gravatar larger.
2) List the most recent or related comment/super comments post of that user.
3) Use the comment engine to allow the user to post a snippet about themselves.
Now you could have a minimum threashold before this kicks in like three comments/ super comment post, or not. I do not know if this would help reduce drive by commentors spamming.
Under Mark’s expanded profile you might see a number of my ‘super comments’ or comments, that other might want to explore… or not. I do not know if these would be quality click throughs.
You could also have cute recognition icons on their profile page, to make people super commentors or whatever. I do not know if this would help, I guess it depends on the website. And the phases used could be entered by the Admin. For example on your recipe website a person that has made 30 comments could have 3 pizzas and a title of ‘gourment chef’. Or ‘stand up comic’ on your jokes website.
Another option might be to let people comment on that page or under leave a public message for: Mr. X.
Or Mr. X could leave a comment under their profile to to be more about themselves.
This opens up some questionable doors as people might not be respectful to others so maybe only the latter would be considered.
‘Danger will Robinson’ (Lost in Space reference) – I have no idea how this would work from an SEO perspective or it would make too many weak pages leaking PR juice.
Further, I have no idea if it would be good or easy from a WordPress perspective. I think on your joke website it could open pandora’s box. However, it could also get people comming back a bit more.
If you look at this website: thephotoletariat.com and hover over their commentors, I think they have a primitive form of this set up.
This is just an idea on how WordPress without slowing down site speed or over loading it with extra tables or scaring people off with registration. Even if a website has something like ‘5 second registration’ my eyes glaze over. I do not even like doing those captcha for spam. I have no idea why people use them on small site.
Maybe I am barking up the wrong tree and a blog should be a blog and a social site should be a social site but this is an idea.
How to Turn a WordPress Blog into a Social Network
IntenseDebate WordPress Comments
After this long comment above, duh, I realizes that most of those features are in a popular plugin called intensedebate.com/features by WordPress.
A website that uses this with success is antiwar.com if you want to explore what it looks like and see if it makes sense for Stallion users in terms of SEO and does it fit with the super comments model.
IntenseDebate WordPress Comments
WordPress Comment Plugin IntenseDebate Review
The IntenseDebate comment plugin includes the features you are thinking about.
Unfortunately using a plugin like IntenseDebate means you loose control over the layout/formatting of your comments since your comments are stored on another site. For example you’d loose the Stallion comment titles and the Stallion SEO Super Comments links to the super comments and those are two very useful SEO features.
You do keep a copy of the comment in your WordPress database and search engines and users with javascript turned off do see your themes version of the comments, but the comment is replicated via user profiles on the IntenseDebate website which could be a duplicate content issue (not looked at the format enough to know for sure).
As a Stallion theme user I wouldn’t install the IntenseDebate comments plugin, if you have a well commented site you’ll loose long tail SERPs related to the comment titles because you and your users won’t see the comment title form.
I’ve given this comment the title:
WordPress Comment Plugin IntenseDebate Review
I know it’s not really a review :-) but, there’s a good chance when this comment is indexed it will rank for that SERP because of the Stallion themes super comments feature. Probably not a high traffic SERP (didn’t check), but even if it generates 5 visitors a month it’s 5 visitors this site wouldn’t receive if I moved to the IntenseDebate plugin.
If you could find a plugin like IntenseDebate that directly uses the comments from the WordPress database (no external site) might be possible to incorporate it into Stallion. That being said as you touched on in your other comment having user profiles is a slippery slope for link SPAMMERs and potential duplicate content issues. For example if this was my only comment and it was added to a user profile like you see with the IntenseDebate plugin there would be the Stallion SEO Super Comments version of this comment and the user profile page with only this comment = duplicate content. You have to be careful reusing the same content because of duplicate content issues.
David
WordPress Comment Plugin IntenseDebate Review
WordPress Author Biography Box
Hi David,
i cant get the author biography box right.
How do i set it up with my picture?
Thanks Billy
WordPress Author Biography Box Avatar
A nice easy one for me to answer :-)
Signup at gravatar.com for a Gravatar account (it’s free) and associate whatever image you want with the email address you use on your WordPress profile page.
The image (avatar) will be used for your comments on your site and on any WordPress blogs you comment on using that email address as well.
David