To start building your online portfolio, the first thing you’ll need to do is create some portfolio posts.

Navigate to Portfolio » Add New Item.

Each portfolio item will include:

• A title.
• Its content – That you’ll create inside the post editor.
• A featured image – Which is the main picture of this item. The image that will represent the item on the Portfolio module (the catalog).
• Categories – Which work independently from the categories of your regular blog posts, and you can use later on to add a categories filter to your Portfolio module.
• And a set of specific options for this item, including different layouts and data fields.

Let’s go over these things.

Enter the item’s title as you’d do in a regular post.

Add a featured image by using the Featured Image box on the right side of the screen. This is the image that will be shown as the “thumbnail” for the item on the Portfolio module.

Now, let’s add some content:

The content of the portfolio item will go inside the post editor. As you would do with a regular post, you can insert inside the editor whatever you’d like: texts, images, galleries and embedded videos.

But here’s an important piece of information: the portfolio item is very smart. It’ll use the content you insert here, but it won’t necessarily display it as it is, but take the images, the texts and the videos and arrange them in different ways according to the layout you choose for it later on.

Does it sound complicate? It is actually not so much. Let’s see an example:

Try inserting in your post a paragraph, a gallery and a video embed from YouTube.

Now scroll to the Options box to pick a layout for this item. Each portfolio item has its own layout, independent from the rest of the items and from the whole Portfolio module.

Although you can use the same layout for all your items, this option lets you to really adapt each item to tell its story in the best way possible.

According to the Artisan theme you’re using you’ll be offered different layout possibilities, but they all basically include 3 main elements: the item’s title (these dark lines), the item’s media (images and videos) which are represented with the dark rectangles, and the item’s text (the lighter lines).

Publish the post now and see how the item looks like.

Now, try choosing a different layout, click “Update” and see how the post changes.

As you can see, it doesn’t matter that much in which order you place these elements in the editor, because the portfolio layout will automatically take those and place them according to its design.

The only layout that won’t do that is the “As created & formatted”. You should use this layout only if you want the post to respect the way you’ve laid things out.

* One more explanation:

Although you can see on each layout the media files being separated, like one image above the other, the portfolio post works with galleries. Instead of inserting separated images in the post editor, always insert a gallery including all the images you want to use. And the layout you choose will take care of using them as it needs.

The only case where you may want to insert separated images is if you’re going to use the “As created & formatted” layout, of course.

To sum up:

Inside the post editor insert: a text, a gallery and videos. Then choose a layout and the item will automatically arrange those elements as per the layout you’ve chosen.

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Let’s take a look at the other options now:

Again, these may vary according to the Artisan theme you’re using. But usually these are included:

The Video/s position and the Keep video/s out of slider let you decide where the videos will be placed in relation to the gallery.

The External Link and the Link Title let you add a button with a link to an external site. For example, if you’re showcasing a product and want to insert a link to buy it, here’s the place to do it. Or if you’re showing a website you’ve built for a client, here you can insert the link to that website.

If you want the images on the post to be opened in a lightbox when clicking on them, you should check the Wrap images with links option. This will add a link to each image, so it can work with a lightbox plugin like Responsive Lightbox which is integrated with the theme.

Last, but not least, there’s the Data Fields, which is very important to portfolio posts.

Let’s say you’re using the portfolio to showcase books. In addition to the book title, picture and description, there are some details that all books have and that you may want to give them a proper and consistent space instead of including them inside the description.

Like the author, the year, the publisher and the genre.

These are Data Fields. And they’re absolutely customizable. You can create the fields you want, and use them or not on each portfolio item. We’ll cover how to create Data Fields for the portfolio items on the next knowledge base article.

For now, you’ll need to know that here is where they will appear. And one more thing. Remember we mentioned these lighter lines on the layouts? These include the Data Fields. So they’ll have their own space in the design.

Let’s now finish creating this portfolio post.

All that left to do is to choose a category. Portfolio categories work exactly the same as regular posts categories. If you haven’t created any yet, you can do it right here. And you can also manage categories by going to Portfolio » Portfolio Categories on the left menu.

Choose a category and publish or update your post.