About WPFolio

WPFolio and WordPress

WPFolio uses the popular, free and open source blog platform WordPress. While initially designed for blogs, WordPress can be used to manage your online portfolio as well. A traditional blog is a type of Content Management System that associates information (usually text and/or an image) with a date. An artists portfolio is also, at the core, information (an image, movie, and/or description) attached to a date; the date you made the piece. By using WordPress as a Content Management System, you can have an online portfolio that’s as simple to update as writing a blog entry. Plus the added benefits of:

• the ability to efficiently update your own content and change the design of your site
• to maintain your site independently, on a server you control
• updating your site via a web interface requiring no software but a web browser
• no advertising
• built-in image management
• a built-in image gallery
• keep visitors updated on your exhibitions, studio progress, and press via an integrated blog
• RSS Feeds to enable visitors to be easily informed of updates to your website
• organize your work with categories and tags, and change the navigation whenever you like
• Change colors and design elements yourself

And if you keep WordPress updated you’ll get all the benefits of features to be developed in years to come.

Plus, it’s free as in “free beer”.

Is this hard?

We’ve worked to make this as easy as possible. If you follow the instructions you should be fine.

Who made this?

WPFolio was developed at the Eyebeam OpenLab by Patrick Carey, Jeff Crouse, Steve Lambert, and Lara Schenck, with help from Daniel Weiner and others. It was originally built out from an earlier theme called Click! by Taly, but has changed to the point of being nearly unrecognizable from the original code since then. It is free software released under a GPLv3 license.

WPFolio History

• Version 1.0 was built primarily by Steve Lambert for a few artist friends who needed a simple theme.
• Version 1.4 was built out by Patrick Carey and Steve Lambert for public release on WordPress.org with PHP heavy lifting from Jeff Crouse
• Version 1.5 rolled in improvements Daniel Weiner made after giving workshops on WPFolio at art schools on the East Coast. Steve also included requests from artists after doing workshops with Creative Capital. Steve and Patrick packaged up 1.5 in preparation for a workshop on WPFolio at the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council.
• Version 1.6 was prepared by Steve Lambert mostly while in residence at the Headlands Center for the Arts and included changes for WordPress 3.0.

For the geeks, here’s what each file does

For your reference. (this list was last updated with version 1.6 and is therefor not current)

• 404.php – where people will end up if they click a bad link
  • features: – includes search field – automatic email notifications of bad links.
• archive.php – formats the archives for tags and taxonomy pages
  
• archives.php – formats the yearly or monthly archives
• category.php – formats blog/news category and other category pages (art work, painting, etc for example)
  • features: automatic formatting changes for blog/news and work samples *automatic thumbnail generation & enables the_post_thumbnail if user selects a thumbnail

• comments.php – handles comments if you enable them
• css folder
• • ie-sucks.css – specific styles to try to make problems caused by Internet Explorer less worse and bad
  • resume.css – styles the CV/Resume page and called only when a page is titles Resume or CV.
  • superfish-navbar.css
  • superfish-vertical.css
  • superfish.css – superfish* styles the dynamic navbar
• date.php – displays art/portfolio posts in the yearly archive view
• footer.php – the footer that appears on every page
  • features: 3 widget enabled areas. Center, which spans the width of the footer, and Left and Right, which divide the footer in half.
• functions.php – includes functions for Administration Panel, WPFolio widgets. Loaded with goodies.
• header.php – the header that appears on every page
  • features dynamic menu highlighting
• images folder - contains various small images necessary for the theme
• index.php
• js folder – contains javascript files for the navigation menu, color picker, etc.
• page.php – formats static pages
  • features special formatting for CV/Resume
• search.php – formats search results (uses blog format)
• single.php – displays single posts
  • features: automatically detects blog or portfolio content and styles the page accordingly.
• style.css – all the styling
  • features: too many to mention.
• taxonomy-media.php – styles the Media taxonomy in a grid similar to the category view
• WPFolio-child-theme folder – child theme you can drag into your theme folder so you can make changes to the WPFolio code the smart way.