WordPress-Powered Portfolios: Slides & Snippets
Sep 19
I really dig WordPress, but not nearly as much as I enjoy spending time with my fellow geeks and colleagues in Portland’s bustling and vibrant open source and web community. It was a pleasure presenting this afternoon!
My presentation was meant to solve the problem of simply and easily associating imagery with pages and/or posts in order to build a killer portfolio theme. I hope designers, artists and hobbyists will use these tips as a springboard for pushing what we can do with this constantly-evolving platform.
Thanks to all in attendance! Here are the goods.
Presentation
Code Snippets
These are hosted on Snipplr for easy viewing, copying and pasting.
- Portfolio item gallery functionality
- Retrieve portfolio items
- Display list of portfolio items (Updated version to support WordPress 2.9 thumbnails)
Other WordPress-Powered Portfolios
Toward the end of the presentation I was happy to show off three other sites with WordPress at their core, volunteered via Twitter. In order of appearance:
- RGB Design Studio by @EricCurtis
- Melissa Delzio Design by @meldel_pdx
- Thoughts & Deeds by @swestbrook
Potentially Helpful Plugins
While none of these are required to execute the above code snippets, they are referenced occasionally in the presentation as ways of taking things to the next level. Or if you’re squeamish about PHP.
@devinsays created a really neat trio of screencasts showing how to streamline this portfolio setup process using Flutter.
Portfolio Designs I Dig
Mentioned briefly as sources of inspiration (I have no idea if any of these have WordPress under the hood).
Update (September 20)
Following the presentation, someone asked me how I moved my blog to a page other than the index (if you’re reading this, please comment so I can attribute your question). The method I used is detailed in the WordPress codex article Creating an Archive Index.
While holding a microphone and my presentation notes simultaneously was more challenging than I anticipated (I apologize if I had to glance down far too often), the positive reaction the presentation received was overwhelming. Thank you all for your heartwarming comments!
Update (December 19)
WordPress 2.9 introduced a new post thumbnail feature that’s really cool. I’ve created an updated code snippet for displaying work samples that uses this feature, as well as an accompanying journal entry.
Comments are closed.
9 Responses RSS
Jacob Golden said 314 days ago:
Hi Tyler,
Just watched your presentation at Wordcamp via streaming and really enjoyed your insights into the portfolio/wordpress process. I’ve just finished the first iteration of my WordPress powered design portfolio – http://www.staygoldendesign.com/jg (sorry for the shameless plug) and now I’ll be able to take some of your ideas as inspiration for the next iteration.
Thanks for sharing.
best,
jacob Golden
Joey said 313 days ago:
Just wanted to say thanks. To be perfectly honest your session was the only one I was interested in yesterday and I wasn’t disappointing. It was one of the two I actually attended.
Great job, and thanks for sharing your methods.
Tyler Sticka said 313 days ago:
Jacob: Cool carousel-style item navigation, I was actually thinking about integrating something similar into my portfolio items.
Joey: Glad I was one of your choices for WordPress geekocity yesterday! Thanks for attending, I’m glad it was valuable for you.
Amber Case said 313 days ago:
Hey! Great presentation, as usual. It’s always awesome to see the original thoughts you always have to bring to the table. I’ll be trying your code snippets to see if I can get them to work. Thanks again!
Tyler Sticka said 313 days ago:
Thanks, Amber! You’re the reigning queen of original thoughts, so I take that as a tremendous compliment.
martha koenig said 312 days ago:
Awesome presentation yesterday Tyler – way to deliver, and with a sense of humor (not that others were lacking…). You may it all seem so easy!
You asked me to send you a reminder, so this is it!: Do you think you could post that link about having a blog on a portfolio site (determining which page it is, etc.).
Thanks!
John James Jacoby said 312 days ago:
Hey Tyler, I found your slide show and website while looking at some of this past weekends WordCamp videos and things. Getting people comfortable with the idea of using WordPress for things like portfolios is getting less and less challenging thanks to efforts from people like yourself. If you feel it’s fitting, feel free to use my site as an example too.
Great work!
Tyler Sticka said 312 days ago:
Martha: Thanks for reminding me! I’ve already added the link to the end of the post, but you can also hop over to the codex article from here (for your convenience, naturally).
John: I dig your explorations of rich JavaScript-powered interactions instead of relying on a plugin like Flash or Silverlight. Thanks for the kind words!
martha koenig said 312 days ago:
Thanks Tyler! Clearly, I didn’t read your whole post well enough. I was distracted by the pretty Twitter image…