Upgrading to 1.6

Exciting – WPFolio 1.6 is almost here. And with it, all kinds of new features and improvements. This post will go over what you can expect when you update and how to have your site looking at it’s best quickly and easily.

WPFolio 1.6 takes advantage of features in WordPress 3.0. When you update, you’ll need to make a few adjustments to your theme to make it current. You will also want to experiment with some of the new features. So, why not start by watching this exciting video on WordPress 3.0?

Updating

look for updates here

First, WPFolio 1.6 requires WordPress 3.0 and up. It’s highly recommended to keep WordPress, your themes, and your plugins updated. And with WordPress 3.0 you can do all this easily from the Admin Interface under Dashboard > Updates. But before we continue, you should already be updated to WordPress 3.0, and all your plugins should be updated. Read more about it at Updating WordPress on the WordPress Codex.

When WPFolio 1.6 is released you can update the theme in the Appearances > Themes area. If that’s not an option, you can download WPFolio from WordPress.org and upload it to your server with your favorite FTP program.

Ok now, everything is up to date and you have the latest version of WPFolio. Have a look around at your site, and then say…

“What happened to my menu?”

WPFolio uses the new custom menu features of WordPress 3.0 that allow you to have beautiful custom, drop-down menus. No more clunky widget hacks! However, by default, when you install the theme it will just show a list of pages in the navifation. There’s a few steps you’ll need to take to make the magic happen!

Step 1. Create A Menu

Start by going to Appearance > Menus. Name your menu, then click on create menu. It needs a name so if you want to have a few and switch them around, you can.

Create a Menu

Step 2. Select Your Menu

Select Your Menu

Step 3. Select and Arrange Menu Items

Select the pages and categories you want to include in your menu, then click add. You can drag these around and arrange them into submenus. Submenus will drop down and look pretty.

add menu items, then drag and drop to arrange them into submenus

Adding Yearly Archive links and external links

Using the Custom Links box, you can add a link to your menu to anywhere. An external link to a project site, another blog, whatever you like. You can also create internal links. And here’s a trick. By adding the code “/?m=2008″ at the end of the url for your wordpress installation this creates a link to yearly archive. For example:

http://yourwebsite.com/?m=2010 creates a link to all work you dated with in the year 2010

http://yourwebsite.com/?m=2009 does the same for 2009

http://yourwebsite.com/?m=2008 ...you get the idea.

If your wordpress installation is in a subfolder, it would work like this:

http://yourwebsite.com/subfolder/?m=2010

Changing the Background

With WordPress 3.0 you can change the background color AND add a background image if you like. The background image will appear on every page. You can tile it or have one image that spreads across the whole background. Solid colors, gradients, tiled wallpaper, big images, yes you can now have any of these options at your fingertips. Exciting!

Using Background Options

Note: the background color is called as a color elsewhere in the theme so remember not to leave it blank.

“Oh my, I get more options for fonts?!”

Yes! Another fun new thing is that you have more options for fonts in the WPFolio Theme Options. These options should work on most computers and degrade to close matches when the first choice of font is available on the users computer. All the changes are based on recommendations in this article on Better Font Stacks.

Category Descriptions!

Category descriptions now appear above the grid of thumbnails on a category page:

You can use this area to introduce a category of work in your portfolio

You can write a description under Posts > Category.

“What happened to my widgets, my fonts, my ____?”

When updating, hopefully all your old selections will remain intact. If not, don’t worry, most can be restored easily, And all the widgets you have created before are saved toward the bottom of the widgets page under Appearance > Widgets and you can put them all back. But it should be fine.

Better Resume Styling

As it turns out, the resume styling in the last version was broken(!) so now it’s fixed. Additionally, the resume css is in a separate resume.css file that’s only called when necessary, which helps load your website faster (in some nearly imperceptibly way). “But how do I take advantage of this?” you ask. I added better instructions and a code sample on the creating pages area on this site. Your resume is about to look sharp.

Previous/Next Links

They work and are included. Make sure you put work in only one category for the best results. For example, you could have a parent category of ART and a child category of DRAWING. Only select drawing and your post will automatically be included in the parent and child categories – and the previous/next navigation will work as expected.

Wide Margins on Pages

Pages now have a default margin of 135 pixels on each side. This is to make the text on pages (about me, resume, contact page, etc) more readable. Though it does cause one problem: if you have a 900px wide image on any page (except the Home page), it throws off the alignment a bit. So as a rule, 630px wide images work best on Pages (again except the home page). If you want to disable this, you can do it by:

• adding the .widemargins-override class to an image (kinda works)
• using the Full Width Page Template – you can select it under Attributes > Template when writing or editing your Page.

Child Theme included!

This is the most powerful part of WPFolio and it will allow you to do… anything really. I’ve written about the reason you’d want to use a Child Theme to modify WPFolio and now there’s a childtheme included to make it as easy as possible. Child Themes allow you to make changes, tweaks, adjustments, rewrites, and generally manipulate theme files and keep your changes separate from the WPFolio code. Why? So you can upgrade to the next new version of WPFolio without losing all your changes! Just drag the sample child theme into your themes directory using your FTP program of choice, and start manipulating the existing files, adding your own template files, and more. I’ve started posting some examples of changes you can make in a child theme on the news area of this site.

Tons of miscellaneous improvements

There are a ton of little improvements in 1.6 like dynamic classes that make WPFolio easier to style, customize, and tweak to your liking. Added efficiencies that make it work better, faster, and leaner. Is it perfect? WPFolio is an ongoing project and there’s always more that can be done. Right now it’s better than ever. If you’d like to contribute, clone the project on github so we can incorporate your improvements!

Thanks & now, please, help us get further.

I want to thank the beta testers who checked this code out and made suggestions. Particularly Karen Bennett who made her opinions known, and send screen shots and code snippets with suggestions on improvements. As well as Mushon Zer-Aviv, Jeff Crouse, Daniel Weiner, Patrick Carey, and Julia Schwadron, and others who sent feedback.

All the changes are great right? Just looking at this list I’m quite proud of this release. But whew, it is a lot of work. It took hours of work over weeks. And untold time in my idle thoughts thinking of little ways to improve things. And there’s more to come. I have more ideas and requests to make WPFolio better.

But in all honesty, what makes it worth it is knowing it’s helping artists get their work online using the best, open source tools available. That WPFolio could mean the difference between someone overspending on Dreamweaver, getting frustrated, and not having a website, and someone using WordPress and WPFolio, spending some time on this site, and having a website that works – that’s a wonderful thing.

It feels great. And money is nice too. Donations help hire skilled programmers that can improve the project. Donations are also a gesture that show you value the code, the tutorials, and the time WPFolio has saved you. If you can’t donate, you can contribute your code (send your child theme!), your feedback on beta releases, or some other way. Part of what fuels this is reciprocation, so please, find a way to reciprocate. It means a lot.