Tyler Sticka

I couldn’t be happier that my WordCamp Portland 2009 presentation, WordPress-Powered Portfolios, will likely have the shortest shelf life of any presentation I’ve given. It’s a testament to the WordPress team (and open source projects in general) that the “hacks” I proposed only months ago have already blossomed into honest-to-goodness features.

In December, WordPress 2.9 introduced support for post thumbnails, eliminating the need for my custom meta hack. WordPress 3.0 (which should be released around May) will solve the problem of secluding portfolio content from your blog with the introduction of custom post types.

Instead of corralling your portfolio content with tools like “category excluders” or relying solely on nested pages (as I suggested), you’ll soon be able to create a custom “portfolio” post type in a supported and predictable fashion.

As Frank Bültge details on the WP Engineer blog, adding a whole new section to your WordPress sidebar will be a straightforward and extremely flexible process you can bake right into your theme. No crazy plugins or hackery required!

This change is exciting not only for the impact it will have on  sites like my own, but because it increases WordPress’ prospects as a hardy CMS solution.

All that’s left to render my presentation completely obsolete is a more robust and customizable gallery solution. I’ll be crossing my fingers.