Most WordPress themes in 2014 are widgitized where you go to “Appearance” >> “Widgets” and drag and drop various widgets on the left to your themes sidebar(s) on the right, creating a WordPress blog precisely how you want it. The simplest of WordPress themes have a single widget area: like a left sidebar where widgets can be dragged to and the 12 WordPress default widgets: Archives Widget Calendar Widget : HIGH SEO Damage Categories Widget Custom Menu Widget Meta Widget : LOW SEO Damage Pages Widget Recent Comments Widget : MEDIUM SEO Damage Recent Posts Widget RSS Widget Search Widget Tag Cloud Widget Text Widget The Stallion Responsive Theme includes no fewer than 21 additional custom WordPress widgets (Stallion also […]
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Custom Widgets
Hi David,
Where do I go to create the custom widget?
Thanks
John
Custom WordPress Widgets
There’s a couple of ways to build custom widgets, which one to use depends on what you want to achieve.
Adding some code from an advertiser for example is best achieved using a Text Widget.
Appearance >> Widgets
Drag and Drop a Text Widget to a widget area and put your code within the form.
Might need some styling depending on what you are putting there.
Other way is code based and requires editing the file
/stallion-seo-theme/widgets/custom-widgets.php
There’s instructions within the file. The custom-widgets.php file is more for widgets you might want to use on multiple sites or there’s code within the widget that won’t work as a Text Widget.
When you add a widget to the file it will become available under Appearance >> Widgets
David
Custom WordPress Widgets
Customizing WordPress Sidebar
I thought I had made this comment a couple days ago but don’t see it showing.
I would like to know how to customize the sidebar.
When I go to my widget option the sidebar shows as being empty. I want to remove and/or reorder what appear to be built in widgets like Links, Meta, Categories etc.
Thanks,
Jeff
WordPress Default Widgets Confusion
A lot of WordPress users get confused on the widgets.
Many themes like Stallion have default widgets, you don’t remove these widgets because they aren’t added as actual widgets, they are hard coded in one of the template files and only show when no widgets are dragged and dropped into those widget areas. The actual widget areas start empty and not used until you add your first widget by dragging and dropping it into the widget area.
In the Stallion theme two of the widget areas have default hard coded widgets (the other widget areas have no defaults), when you add your first widget to the left sidebar the hard coded menu items are no longer used (the code isn’t loaded) and only widgets dragged and dropped into the left sidebar widget area is shown (same for the right sidebar).
Drag and drop a couple of widgets to the left widget area and the same for the right and view the home page and it will all make sense. Only add the widgets you want on your site.
On this site I use the left and right widget areas and the first 4 footer widget areas to achieve this look. There are other Stallion widget areas (11 in total) I’ve not used, but do use on other sites.
David
WordPress Default Widgets Confusion
WordPress Default Widgets Confusion
Hi David,
Thank you for your reply. I am very familiar with hard coded WordPress default widgets. In fact I assumed that is what these were. However, after inserting widgets into my sidebar and still seeing these default widgets as well I decided to comment here and ask for help.
After reading your reply I took a harder look at my blog. I found the problem and solution to what looks to be either a bug or a plugin conflict.
I am using the Right 310px sidebar layout option. When I go to widgets it shows both placement for both Left Sidebar and Right Sidebar. Sense I am using the right sidebar layout I would drop the widgets into that placeholder. As you can see on my test site at I have added both the Recent Post widget and a Text widget. Yet the Categories, Links, Meta, and RSS Feeds default widgets are still showing/loading.
The solution:
I need to load a widget into the Left Sidebar widget holder. That widget also loads in my Right Sidebar and causes the default widgets not to load.
Jeff C.
WordPress Default Widgets Confusion
Stallion SEO Theme Layouts and Widgets
All the widget areas are used in all Stallion layouts, so both the left and right widget areas are used in the Left and Right layouts. They are also used in the No sidebars layout, to literally have nothing in the left/right sidebar you add a blank Text widget to the left and right sidebar widget areas.
I see your original confusion you later discovered the solution for yourself, you’ve assumed for the Right layout you’d put everything in the right sidebar widget area and the Left layout put everything in the left sidebar widget area.
For the Left/Right layouts the left and right sidebar widget areas are stacked on top of each other and because of the way the layouts are generated not always in a logical way because of how the template files are coded** So when adding widgets for the Left and right layouts you still have to add at least one widget to each left/right sidebar widget area.
** Stallion is coded so the same template files (same HTML code) creates all the different layouts and colour schemes so no matter which layout you use you still get full SEO benefit. The layouts are created from different CSS files (one for each layout) which have no SEO impact. If you’ve ever tried to code what’s called the holy grail layout it’s a pain to get right, I also wanted to have the main content loaded high in the code AND have the 9 layouts without having to use different template files, REALLY difficult.
David
Stallion SEO Theme Layouts and Widgets
WordPress Category Widget
How could I use the Footer Widgets with the Title of a Category and then listing ~5 posts of each category in each widget? For example:
First Footer Widget = Category-1 and listing 5 posts of Category-1
Second Footer Widget = Category-2 and listing 5 posts of Category-2
Third Footer Widget = Category-3 and listing 5 posts of Category-3
Fourth Footer Widget = Category-4 and listing 5 posts of Category-4
Thanks
Héctor
WordPress Category Widget
Single WordPress Categories Widget
This will be possible in Stallion 7.0. There’s a new Stallion 7.0 widget (Stallion Posts Widget) that can do a lot including choosing posts from one or as many categories as you want.
Think recent posts widget with optional thumbnail image and excerpts, all types of post selection available: by popularitiy, recent, latest modified, by title, by post ID with order reversable.
Also includes default thumbnail sets, so if you haven’t added thumbnail images to all your posts Stallion 7.0 will use one of the default thumbnails. There’s custom set slots, so you can add your own default thumbnails as well.
So you’ll be able to achieve what you want in Stallion 7.0.
David
Single WordPress Categories Widget
WordPress Ads
On my website, I can not seem to remove your Stallion Advertisement that is on the right hand side column.
Also, is there a way that I can hide my tags in WordPress?
Removing the Stallion Default Widgets from WordPress
The Stallion banner ad is a default widget, all the sidebar items are defaults that are meant to be over written when you add your first widgets to the left and right sidebars. The default widgets are there so a site works right away, but it isn’t meant to be left with the defaults, there’s some awesome Stallion widgets under Appearance >> Widgets that can make a site unique. You must try out the “Stallion SEO Posts Widget”, that adds the widgets with the thumbnail images (you can add multiple Stallion SEO Posts widgets with different settings).
Quite a few customers have this issue of not understanding how default widgets work so in the next update I’ve added notices explaining what to do to remove them. This is what you’ll see when a users is logged into a Stallion site and no widgets have been added (your normal visitors won’t see this):
On the Right sidebar
On the Left Sidebar
Did you find that enough information to direct you to Appearance >> Widgets and at least add one widget to the Right Sidebar and one widget to the Left Sidebar so you understood the act of adding the widgets removed the defaults? If so my work here is done :-)
David
Removing the Stallion Default Widgets from WordPress
Removing WordPress Tags
WordPress core doesn’t have an option to hide tags as such, you can delete them. Had a look at your site and you’ve added way too many tags on that post. I’d edit the post and remove most of the tags.
Some SEO advice adding tags for the sake of it is generally a bad idea, I rarely use tags because they are the same format as categories. If a post can be added to a tag it can probably be added to a category, so why have both. I also tend towards minimalistic number of cateogries/tags to avoid duplicate content issues. If you have two tags Make Money Online and how to Make Money Online and they both contain the exact same posts they are not only duplicate content, they are also a waste of link benefit.
There’s quite a few plugins that auto generate tags, I wouldn’t recommend using them.
Stallion has the option not to show tags on archive pages like on the home page and categories.
Stallion Layout Options – Hide Post Tags on Archive Pages
You’ll still have the tag list at the bottom of posts. If you are set on having big tag lists, but you don’t want them listed at the bottom of posts you could make a Page Template that lacks the tag code. I would suggest limiting tags per post to a few (I tend to add zero tags).
David
Removing WordPress Tags
Removing WordPress Recent Comments Widget and Recent Posts Widget
We are trying to use you product to update my PR4 website because the SEO features maybe of value, but would like to remove some items to make the site look less like a blog.
I have set the format to a single column but would like to remove from the “Leave a reply …” to the “Recent Comments” section
Is there a way to do this with the site setup options or do I need to edit (remove) code.
Tried to remove some code in the side bar but ended getting error messages. Can you let me know what to modify. (Sorry I am a marketer not tech person)
Removing WordPress Recent Comments Widget and Recent Posts Widget
How to Have No WordPress Widgets
Sounds like you are new to WordPress and haven’t played around with widgets yet. No need to make any code changes to achieve what you want, if you have got modified files online suggest you upload the original files as you might have removed important code for achieving what I describe below.
The sidebars which in the layout you are using are at the bottom of the content rather than the side are called widget areas.
Under your Dashboard go to Appearance >> Widgets where you will find a big list of widget areas on the right and a lot of widgets on the left, each widget area is a different location of the theme and can hold content via the widgets on the left. The widgets hold/generate the content.
Stallion includes two default widget areas, Left and Right sidebars so when Stallion is first installed you don’t find a blank sidebar that looks like the site is broken. As you are using an older version of Stallion (7.0) you didn’t get the notice to go to Appearance >> Widgets, in Stallion 7.1+ when Stallion is first installed there’s a block of text on each sidebar explaining some of this so a new users knows how to set their widgets and remove the default widgets. You are also missing out on some new features not upgrading.
Anyway, if you want no sidebars at all drag and drop a Text Widget into the right sidebar widget area, add nothing to it, do the same to the left sidebar. This will override the Stallion default widgets (when the first widgets added the default widgets are removed) and leave your site with empty sidebars.
This is generally not a good idea for the vast majority of sites, all depends on the size of the site, layout and what it’s aim. If it’s going to remain a small site (not many pages) you can run with no sidebars/widgets, if you built a site with 50+ pages you really need widgets to add links through the site so search engines index them all.
Looks like you’ve only add Static Pages currently which are all by default being added to the top menu. If you plan to add more static Pages that area will run out of space quickly, recommend the following.
Appearance >> Menus
On the right create a new custom menu, name it topnav in the Menu name box.
Add the most important pages to this menu, save it, on the left under Theme Locations select topnav for the Primary Navigation.
This will add your important links on the top as they are now minus not so important links. When you create new Static Pages that are important add them to the menu.
Create another menu, call it footerlinks and add other links that aren’t as important to it. Add this menu to the Theme Locations Footer Links, anything added there will be shown in the footer.
The above will give you more freedom with adding Static Pages, if you look at the top menu on this site you can see it’s dropdown as well, this is part of the system described above and allows you to add a lot of links without it filling the top of your site with links.
Bit of SEO advice as well, a page like which appears to be the soundtrack to a film should be named something like
1999 Film Soundtrack
This will tell search engines what the page is about much better than a title like Music.
If you make this change to all your pages without changing the custom menus described above you’ll find your top navigation links will have a lot of text and it will spill over, if you want to keep the links clean by adding the custom menu you can edit the links text on the menu page and change them to Music or Soundtrack.
David
How to Have No WordPress Widgets
How to Use WordPress Single Post Widget?
Hello David,
Now I saw the Stallion Single Post Widget and I also tried to do and put it on the side bar but I could not see any change display. How can i do it?
Thank you
WordPress Single Post Widget
On Blog Post and Static Page edit screens add whatever code you want shown only for that blog post/static page to the Stallion Single Post widget meta box. You could for example add a banner ad as fully formed HTML code.
On the Appearance >> Widgets page drag and drop the Stallion Single Post widget to a widget area.
This widget will only load on posts and pages you’ve added content on the edit screen.
From the sounds of things you missed stage one, so none of your posts/pages have content for that widget, so it didn’t load anything.
The Stallion Single Post widget is a quick way to add a single custom widget to a post/page, there are other ways to achieve similar results. Every widget can be shown/hidden on various parts of a site. When you view the home page of this site you’ll see some text widgets with information describing how I built the widget, those text widgets only load on the home page.
To have this Stallion feature under Stallion Layout Options set Widget Display ON
Under all multi-widgets (not available under the older single widgets) you’ll have more options to hide/show the widget. Only problem with this feature is if you had a 50 page site and wanted for example a different Stallion Custom Ad on all 50 pages you would have to add 50 versions of the Stallion Custom Ad widget which would be a nightmare to maintain. That’s why we have the Stallion Single Post Widget, a single widget controls all the posts/pages and we add the content on the page/post edit screen.
The Widget Display feature is more for showing/hiding content on a single or small number of category or disabling a widget on a set of posts rather than trying to manage widgets on a post by post basis.
Stallion is much more versatile than your average WordPress theme widget wise.
David
WordPress Single Post Widget