Skip the crap about why I chose Wordpress as a plattform for this portfolio site. I did choose it, and for the truth, it took a lot of blood, sweat, tears and also a great [...]]]>

Skip the crap about why I chose Wordpress as a plattform for this portfolio site. I did choose it, and for the truth, it took a lot of blood, sweat, tears and also a great amount of time to research and experiment with all kinds of (PHP) CMS available out there. Believe me, Wordpress along with its fabulous plugins have everything that suits your needs in order to build any kind of personal website, including portfolio site of course.

First, take a look at the requirements for this portfolio:

1. Displaying all of the web and graphic design works in full (fixed) sizes on one page.
2. Categorizing works by year of delivering.
3. Uploading works’ image-files to separated folders (other than default folder of Wordpress’s Media).
4. Cropping, resizing, rotating and adding watermark to uploaded images within the Wordpress built-in post editor.
5. 3 different types of displaying posts-list for 3 different sections: portfolio, blog, lab.
6. Integrating twitter into the blog section.
7. Integrating flickr.

Part 1: Plugins

1. Nextgen Gallery

From the author of the plugin: “Before I start writing the plugin I study all image and gallery plugins for WordPress, I figure out that some of them are really good and well designed, but I missed a simple and easy administration back end to handle multiple galleries.” . I agreed. I do, too, need something simple and intuitive yet powerful enough to handle complex tasks like uploading multiple files, organizing folders, displaying image galleries in your posts ..etc.. To be honest, I just need it to organize my portfolio images uploading folders, so I can, later, backup the whole portfolio folder easier.

(Wordpress’s media uploading feature is lack of folder organizing, you only can organize your uploads into month- and year-based folders)

2. Scissors

Scissors is an image editor plugin that works perfectly fine with Wordpress Media. It allows you to do cropping, resizing, rotating, and watermarking images “in a naturally looking way (no major changes to existing dialogs).”

With these 2 plugins, the requirements number 3 and 4 are handled with ease.

For the requirements number 7 and 8:

3. Twitter for Wordpress

Displays your public Twitter messages for all to read. Based on Pownce for Wordpress by Cavemonkey50. By Ricardo González.

4. flickrRSS

Allows you to integrate the photos from a flickr rss feed into your site. By Dave Kellam and Stefano Verna.

Other plugins I used in this portfolio site

5. Breadcrumb NavXT – Adminstration Interface

Adds a breadcrumb navigation showing the visitor’s path to their current location. This enables the administrative interface for specifying the output of the breadcrumb trail. For details on how to use this plugin visit Breadcrumb NavXT. By John Havlik.

6. Redirection

Manage all your 301 redirects and monitor 404 errors By John Godley. I used this to redirect the link to portfolio category to its subcategory portfolio/2009.

7. SEO Slugs

Removes common words like ‘a’, ‘the’, ‘in’ from a post slugs to improve SEO. By Andrei Mikrukov.

8. WP-PageNavi

Adds a more advanced paging navigation to your WordPress blog. By Lester ‘GaMerZ’ Chan. “advanced paging” here means “First Previous 1 2 3 4.. 12 13 Next Last” kind of navigation.

9. Custom Field Template

This plugin adds the default custom fields on the Write Post/Page. By Hiroaki Miyashita. It really useful when you’re about to repeatedly input the same custom fields for the same kind of post such as portfolio post entry with its attributes (client, date,url, roles,..)