In my quest for an easy to understand way to set up a portfolio in wordpress, I have been all over the web, trying to wade my way through many different ways to do it and deciding how to best accomplish what I needed.  The following is the process I went through to achieve what I needed to set up my web design portfolio within the WordPress blogging platform:

  1. Create a Post Category named Portfolio (or your choice of title).
  2. Create a Page Category named Portfolio (or your choice of title).
  3. Install and activate the Page Links To plugin.
    Then, click to the Portfolio Category, and copy the URL.  Go to the Page and edit the Page you’ve designated for your portfolio, and paste the URL in the “Page Links To” field at the bottom of the edit page. This will allow you to link to your portfolio from your main navigation.
  4. Install and activate the ACE – Advanced Category Excluder plugin.
    Go to ACE » Settings, and check the first 3 boxes. This removes the Portfolio category from your category list.
    Then, go to ACE » Categories, and checkmark the Portfolio to hide it on the homepage section. Optionally you may also hide it from the archive section.  (I didn’t hide it from the other sections).
  5. Install and activate the Reveal ID’s for Wordpress Admin plugin.
    This will allow you to easily identify the ID for the category your portfolio was assigned.  You need this number in order to make a custom category page, so that you can design your portfolio to display more like a portfolio than a blog post. You do that by copying your category.php and renaming it to category-7.php (for ex.  Replace the number with the ID your portfolio category has been assigned.

Stay tuned for part two where I explain how to customize the layout template for the Portfolio using custom fields.

These are some other options I considered, but didn’t quite seem to be what I needed.  However they may be useful to somebody out there!

  1. Creating an image gallery with Wordpress bookmarks
  2. Build a Dynamic Design Portfolio with Wordpress
  3. Using the Wordpress Link Manager to Display your Portfolio