Portfolio Press is an excellent theme for showcasing your photography, art, web sites, or other projects. It also works nicely as a regular blog site. An options panel is available for uploading logos and changing the layout. There’s also support for various post formats and menus.
Here’s a video screencast of how it works:
The theme is in the WordPress Themes Directory. You can demo it here. Or download a copy and try it out.
Suggested Plugins
You will need to Portfolio Post Type plugin to use the portfolio features.
You will need to the Options Framework plugin to enable the options panel.
Examples of the Portfolio Theme in Action
Golden Retriever Adoption
Black Frame Media
Panama Hats for Sale
Saturday Afternoon Filmmakers
Credits
Portfolio was built on the solid foundation of Toolbox:
http://wordpress.org/extend/themes/toolbox
Styles, especially the menus and buttons, were inspired by Canvas:
http://www.woothemes.com/2010/02/canvas/
Jquery rollovers for portfolio items was based on code by:
http://graphpaperpress.com/themes/workspace/
Translations by Eduardo-Martín Larequi García, Wolforg, Erling Håmsø, and Sandro Bauer.
Special Thanks
Also, special thanks to Michael Fields and Jake M Gold who helped test the theme and gave excellent feedback + code suggestions.
Instructions and Common Questions
How to Set Up a Portfolio Item:
When you activate Portfolio Press, you will see a new post type called “Portfolio”. Click “Add New Item” and you will be taken to the edit page where you can add a title, description, and tags for your portfolio piece.
To add the portfolio image, click “Set featured image” on the right side of the screen beneath “Portfolio Tags”. This will take you to the media uploader to add your image. When you finish, click “Use as Featured Image”.
How to Set Up the Menus
A lot of people were asking how the menus work. Here’s a video that explains it, plus instructions for how to create different portfolio sections.
Whitescreen of Death:
404 Errors:
This theme uses custom post types. If you are getting a 404 error when you try and view the portfolio posts, reset your permalinks. You can do this by going to “Settings > Permalinks” and re-saving the permalink structure.
Portfolio Items Disappear:
If you deactivate the “Portfolio Post Type” plugin, your portfolio items will disappear. They are still saved in the database, but you need the plugin in order to access them.
How can I have different portfolio sections?
Use the portfolio tags or categories. These are like the regular tags in posts. You can also put the links in the menu- so, Portfolio could be your main menu item that display all the items, and then have a drop down menu with illustration, websites, etc that link to the tag urls and just displays those items.
How do I change the size of the thumbnail images?
At some point I will probably make theme options for this, but for now you’ll have to do this through the code. Open the file functions.php, and find the line of code that says: add_image_size( ‘portfolio-thumbnail’, 215, 175, true );. The first number “215″ is the width- the second number “175″ is the height. Note, that there is a clear div generated every 3 items to start the next row- so if you change this to only have two items across, you’ll also need to update that code in archive-portfolio.php.
If you change the thumbnail size, you was also need to install this plugin and regenerate thumbnails.
How do I change the number of portfolio items per page?
Change: $query->set( ‘posts_per_page’, ’9′ ) in functions.php, and: ‘posts_per_page’ => 9, in content-portfolio.php.
Can I stop the featured image showing in double in the portfolio?
Yes, install the options panel and choose “Display images manually.”
How can I make the portfolio display on the home page?
Create a new page, call it whatever you like, and choose the page template “Portfolio” (on the right side of the screen in page attributes”. This will now display the portfolio on this page.
Then under “Settings” > “Reading” click “Front page displays” a static page. Then select the page you just created that has the portfolio.
Can I display my portfolio items in with my regular posts?
Yes, but you’ll just need to update the query call on every template where you want both to appear. See Justin Tadlock’s article about this. The intention of this theme was to have them live separately.
My Thumbnails Looks Distorted, Cropped or Weird
Try installing this plugin and regenerating them: http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/regenerate-thumbnails/
Do you like the theme?
Rate it at: http://wordpress.org/extend/themes/portfolio-press
I have lost the second row of tools when adding a new page or new portfolio. Soon when i want to paste text, a Past a Plain Text window pops up, leaving me with no options to paste formated text into my pages. I dont know what happened to the original set of tools or how to get it back.
Any help, please!
I have solved this problem by deactivating all the plugins not directly related to portfolio press. And instantly my editing tools returned. I think it was the FolioPress WYSIWYG or the WP Google Fonts, i deactived them both at the same time without checking in between. Neither of those plugins do anything useful for me anyway and obviously one is a hazard.
Hi Devin. New to all of this – figuring it out as I go. Chose your theme. Installed the Options Framework and now have lost the basic settings I had originally so can not check box entitled “display images manually”. So thumbnail repeats in portfolio post and can’t figure out how to not show it.
So now I have a list of theme ops that aren’t changing anything – of course I am so new I have no idea if they would with this theme. Ugh. Thanks for your help. bp
I created a custom portfolio page using the Menu option together with Portfolio tags so I have displayed only selected pictures on it.
The problem is I can’t set it up as a home page, it doesn’t show up in “Static pages”
How can I resolve that?
Only pages show up in the “Static Pages” list. So, you’d need to create a page and have a template applied to it, or duplicate your new template and label it home.php, or do some fancy template filtering (ala http://www.billerickson.net/reusing-wordpress-theme-files/).
thanks Devin, I am almost there now.
I used templates from files archive-portfolio.php -> home_page.php and content-portfolio.php -> home-portfolio.php
I edited home-portfolio.php and edited this line:
‘posts_per_page’ => 3,
Now I need to select a different 3 portfolio pictures to display on this home page, can you tell me what part of code selects the portfolio pictures? I can read HTML but only beginner in php.
Hey Devin,
Great plugin. Is there any way to decrease the opacity of the thumbnail when hovered?
Thanks,
Erickson
You’d need to edit the js: https://github.com/devinsays/portfolio-press/blob/master/js/theme.js
First, thanks for the lovely theme–it’s clean and elegant and just what I was looking for!
I’m rather a newbie at WordPress, and I have two questions.
First, is there a way to create a page (other than the portfolio page) that doesn’t show a title on top? I’d like to set the page now called “Future Home” as my homepage, and I know how to do that when I go live, but it would look a lot better without either “Home” or some other title showing up!
Second, is there a way to remove the white border from images? I don’t mind it on the pages that link to the portfolio items, but it looks not so great on my future homepage.
Thank you!
Okay! I figured out how to deal with the white borders–either eliminate the padding or change the background color (in the CSS).
I still am wondering about how to eliminate the title on my home page. Is there any way to do this on one page and not the others?
Hi Devin–
I love the simplicity of this theme. Thanks. I am putting together a site for my mother who is a sculptor, but most of her images are vertical and I am getting unpleasant black borders on the portfolio images.
What options do I have? What size is the portfolio image box? (so I can crop and resize photos is possible) Or should I be resizing the image box to a vertical? And how do I do that?
Thanks!
PS: I have done simple customization before– just tell me what file and what the code is and I can find it.
I’d change the size of the images. Read where it says “How do I change the size of the thumbnail images?” on this post for more info.
I use your pagelines template for my website.
My website is still under construction, and it will take a while to complete it. I would like to have my website not published, while I am still working on it. Is any way, I can show this website is “under construction” or any way not to publish the content of all the pages?
Thanks
This plugin can do that: http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/wp-maintenance-mode/. Pagelines?
Hi Devin, love the theme! Thank you for creating and making it available! My question is this: can you describe how to change the single post layout so that no sidebar is shown? Right now my sidebar widget is empty but the pages still show the “Archives” and “Meta” menus, by default I assume. When someone clicks on one of my portfolio thumbs I would like to take them to a page where my photos display in the full width of the theme without a sidebar. I’ll use the Footer for any items I would normally place in the sidebar. I assume this change can be made by editing the single post php file but I’m not sure how to do it so I thought I’d ask. Thanks!
In the options panel you can choose to display portfolio pages full width.
I found a flukey kind of glitch with this theme when it’s open in a window that’s not wide enough to hold the whole thing–when you scroll toward the missing right part of the page, the black under the logo and menus and the gray pattern under the content and sidebars disappears. That’s unattractive but not so bad under the sidebar, because you can still see the text–but it’s a problem under the menus because you can see the menu titles.
How would I fix this?
Thanks!
After spending several hours with a far more knowledgeable friend, we (mostly she) figured out that the width was defaulting to 100% of the window width for the #branding, #content, and #colophon backgrounds, and that a min-width setting in three places would fix the problem–you can check my website (rachelreiss.com) if you want to see where they were put.
Hope this helps someone!
Is there a way to make the sidebar go away on all pages (including the portfolio item pages?
You can edit the code and remove it from the templates, or you could just put a blank text widget in there and have it look blank.
My website is coming along nicely now but where does the link in Header.php point to for the website description? I need to change the description to something more useful but can’t find it amongst all the pages.
Thanks
Settings > General: “Tagline” (from WordPress dashboard)
Hi Devin, what you suggest will only change the page title, not the actual description. Normally found in header.php
Devin, your suggestion about using the “Full width portfolio” template would only work when creating a page. I am trying to get a full width from a portfolio post. And creating a blank text widget does not eliminate the sidebar, it just makes the area blank. Ideally I would like to create a portfolio post for a YouTube video that can be displayed as large as possible. With the sidebar I can only use the 640 wide YouTube embeds. I know I can create a page with the full-width portfolio template that will display the YouTube video at 960, but because there is no “featured image” option when making a page I have no way of using a thumbnail for the video that will show up with my other thumbs in the grid on my home page. So right now it seems like I’ll have to create a portfolio post for the featured image (thumbnail) and a separate page for the full-width video embed, then use a Redirection plugin to force the portfolio post to go to the page post. Or I can just remove the sidebar code from one of the php files, in this case I’m guessing “content-portfolio.php”? Do you have any thoughts on this? Am I missing another much easier way to accomplish what I want?
Okay, I understand what you’re asking. You’ll need to remove the sidebar call from https://github.com/devinsays/portfolio-press/blob/master/single-portfolio.php, and then update the css to display the content area full width.
I’d like to know which lines to remove too.
I want the widgets on the portfolio home page, but not in the posts themselves.