Lisa Kalandjian

WordPress Portfolio – Custom Post Types & Metaboxes

LisaK — Sun, 22 Apr 2012 18:50:19 +0000

Web Designers are under the most pressure to create a website that properly reflects their talents but designing for yourself can be particularly hard, and in the case of a portfolio showcase site the last thing you want to do is detract from your portfolio. I went for sleek, clean and simple which is my favorite approach anyway. I started off like I always do with a series of Photoshop mockups of the home page, blog page, single post page and inside page, then split the graphics and uploaded my base theme. I have tried working with theme frameworks before but just never managed to feel at home with them, although I realize frameworks like Thesis and Genesis are exceptionally good, and working with child themes is the approach a lot of WordPress developers prefer. In the end I painstakingly built my own base theme which is currently serving me well.

I had worked with meta boxes in my last project and had somewhat fallen in love with them. The project had required a complicated page layout that the client was never going to be able to handle updating by themselves if it had been hard coded, so custom meta boxes provided a perfect solution. Now they can upload files, add amazon affiliate links, type bullet points and everything appears magically in the correct place on the page. What’s not to love! For my purposes though I wanted to be able to have a custom post type for my portfolio and just have the meta boxes appear on those posts. This tutorial by Richard Shepherd proved to be very valuable, but I wanted to include the Meta Box Plugin by Rilwis which I loved using in the previous project I mentioned so I left out step 3 of Richard’s tutorial and used the Meta Box Plugin instead.

On the left is the Portfolio Custom Post Type, and on the right is how the Portfolio entry looks on the front end.

You can see the result by clicking on any of the images on this page.

Why I Love WordPress

LisaK — Wed, 18 Apr 2012 19:40:20 +0000

WordPress and me were acquainted in 2008 when I began stumbling across WordPress powered websites and was suitably impressed to explore further. I started designing WordPress sites in 2009 and the site you are currently reading this post on is the latest in a long line of sites I’ve designed on the WordPress platform. For a website designer, designing WordPress sites is a fairly joyous experience, as geeky as that sounds, it is so completely logical, powerful and unlike other development platforms once I’m done with a site, I can hand it over to my client and if they have used a word processor, or email application before then they can manage their WordPress site beautifully, and completely, by themselves without having to rely on me to help them. They can write and publish blog posts which can include pictures and video. Pictures auto-resize and thumbnails are automatically created so the site stays looking great. They can easily create new pages, and add or remove pages from the dynamic menu just by dragging them on their screen. I hard code a lot of functionality into the sites, but with WordPress we are spoiled with a plethora of plugins that can add even more. WordPress used to be known primarily as a blogging platform but now it can be anything you want and remain easy to use for the website owner. It can be anything from a corporate website, to an online store, to a portfolio site like this one, a magazine type site, an events listing site and so on and so forth. Honestly I can’t understand why everyone doesn’t have one!

…And We’re Live!

LisaK — Tue, 10 Apr 2012 12:40:53 +0000

I bought this domain name about a year ago, luckily for me there aren’t many Lisa Kalandjians in the world so I didn’t have to fight for it, but at the time I didn’t realize how long it would take me to actually get my site designed and launched. The first reason it took so long was because I was so busy designing things for my clients, and the second reason was because I turned out to be the worst design client I’d ever had. I was so picky, there were times I almost fired myself.

Because I have a large portfolio I wanted it to be easy to put up new additions so I decided to make the portfolio a custom post type and used meta boxes for the various fields in the website portfolio section. As of now the Website Portfolio is done, minus the descriptions of each site, and the Branding Portfolio is done. In the coming days I’ll be adding the Social Media, and Email Portfolios, plus an extra section to showcase the extensive image editing I’ve done over the years.