There are a number of changes in this latest version of Portfolio Press and Portfolio+. I’m hoping the update will be seamless for most users, but there will be a few steps to complete once you upgrade.
Page templates have been updated in this version, so if you have any page templates set (say for the portfolio on the home page), you may need to go to that page, re-select the template, and re-save. I wrote an update routine to do this but it won’t fire in all situations. So, just to be safe, give it a check and make the updates if needed.
Next, the theme should prompt you to change your posts per page settings in the reading options. I recommend 9. Previously, the theme had automatically controlled this, but people have often wanted to change the default (to 12 or 15). This now you gives you that control. It also fixes edge case paging bugs that some users experienced.
Finally, you’ll want to install the Regenerate Thumbnails plugin and generate new images. The theme should also prompt for this. There were a couple of image size changes in this update (especially if you had the one column layout selected)- and this will ensure that your images are at the proper size and should fix images that may have appeared blurry previously. Continue reading →
Portfolio Press is a responsive WordPress 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.
Portfolio Press has been downloaded from WordPress.org over 500,000 times. For the majority of people this basic version works great, but I always a get a few requests from people want more design and customization options. That’s why I built Portfolio+.
More Options
If your site is already running Portfolio Press, switching to Portfolio+ will be easy. And once you’ve activated Portfolio+, you’ll have options to change the text and link colors, hide the site tagline, change the number of portfolio items that appear per page, swap out backgrounds and more. I’ve also added some neat new features, like infinite scroll.
You’re also welcome to customize the theme even further by editing the stylesheet. I built a child theme to put those customizations in. Please note, I do not offer support for customizing the actual theme code (PHP/CSS/Javascript).
Downloading Portfolio+
Portfolio+ is not longer being actively developed aside from minor compatibility updates. If you purchased a license which is still valid, updates will still be pushed out via the theme updater and support is available by email. For others, if you wish to download a copy of the theme you can find it on GitHub.
I recently released a plugin to WordPress.org that registers a portfolio post type, related taxonomies, and adds an image when you’re viewing the items in the dashboard. Here’s a walk through of the code involved.
I’ve used custom post types to display portfolio items since WordPress 3.0 when they were first introduced.
Portfolios work well as a custom post types because they generally aren’t displayed in the regular feed (like posts), they usually need a taxonomy (which isn’t done in pages by default), and as a custom post type its easier to give them their own metaboxes (like a project link, or image).
However, if you register a “portfolio” post type directly with the theme- whenever you change themes you’ll need to copy over the code code. And since I just recently did this, I thought I might as well release my code as a plugin and let other folks do it as well.
What This Plugin Does
The Portfolio Post Type Plugin will:
Registers a new portfolio post type
Registers separate portfolio taxonomies for tags and categories
Displays the portfolio image in the dashboard column view
What This Plugin Doesn’t Do
This plugin won’t handle any of the front end display of your post type. If you want to style those or change the layout, you’ll probably want to add archive-portfolio.php and single-portfolio.php to your theme.
When You Shouldn’t Use This Plugin
If you want your portfolio items to go out in the regular feed, or be displayed alongside posts- you’ll likely want to use post formats instead. With a post format you can set your post as an “image” or a “gallery”, and even display it differently on the front end using custom templates. Here’s a link to the codex about post formats.
I just started work on video course for learning WordPress theme development. It’s designed for folks who are familiar with using WordPress and would like to start building themes professionally (for clients or for their own work). The plan is to release the entire video series for free.
Since the focus is on professional development, I’ll be covering developer tools as much as actual theme development. Introducing topics like local environments, version control and build tools all together as it relates to WordPress themes will (I think!) be really useful for new developers getting up to speed.
If you or a friend has been looking to move into WordPress theme development, get on the mailing list and I’ll let you know when the first video is available.
At 10up we have a guidebook of engineering best practices that all our teams follow. Now that responsive images finally have good browser support, we’ve been trying think through best practices with responsive images.
Some questions:
Is there a “best practice” for sizes to generate?
Should all images be generated at multiple sizes and updated with srcset values?
How will using srcset impact page weight (i.e. worth the effort)?
My initial assumption was “yes”, we should be using responsive images whenever we’re outputting a featured images. Using the “correct” size image can lead to huge performance gains.
But as I started to look at real world use cases, it got complicated. Let’s take a look at Twenty Fifteen as an example. Continue reading →
