In addition to the portfolio post type and the Portfolio module, with the portfolio functionality you’ll also find a specific tab in Theme Options for all the portfolio related stuff. (I’m sorry you had to listen to the word “portfolio” that many times).

The options here are more technical than design or style related.

1. Portfolio Items Slug Prefix: lets you write the prefix for the portfolio posts’ URL. By default that is “portfolio-item”. But if you’ll be using the portfolio for books, you may want to change that to “books” or “book-item”. It’s also useful if you’re building a site in a different language.

This means the URL for one of your books will be:
yourdomain.com/book-item/some-book-title

After inserting your own slug prefix and saving the option, you’ll need to make a permalinks flush. In other words, you need to refresh your site’s permalinks structure for it to apply. Go to Settings » Permalinks, and click Save.

2. On the single portfolio post view there’s an optional button linking back to the whole portfolio. It allows visitors to go see all items when they finished looking at one. The View All Items URL and View All Items Text options define where you want to take your visitors to with that button and which will be the text of that button.

For example, the text could be “See all my books” and the URL will be a link to the Books page on your site.

3. Another thing the single portfolio post has if you enabled it, is the navigation. Which allows navigating from one post to the next or previous one. If you want your users to navigate within the same post’s category instead of browsing all the portfolio items, then enable the Keep Navigation in Same Category option. Keep in mind it will only work for non-ajax portfolio modules.

4. On the Portfolio tab in Theme Options you’ll also find the Data Fields section. Here is where you’ll create the data fields you want to use in your portfolio items (like Author, Year, Publisher or Genre).Each data field should have a title (e.g. Genre), a slug (e.g. genre), and you can also decide if you want the title to be shown next to its data on the portfolio item or just display the data. Like, you want it to say “Genre: Drama” or just “Drama”.

If you’ll want to display the title, a useful tip will be to add the colon at the end of the title (as shown in the last example).

You can add as many data fields as you’d like. And that doesn’t mean you need to use them on each portfolio item. Only data fields you complete on the item’s page will appear on the front end, those that are empty won’t show up.

5. Finally, there are two options related to the Portfolio Transients. Transients are a way of storing cached data in the database temporarily, what improves the site’s performance.

We use them across the theme to store the output of the modules for a page, and we use them to store the output of a single Portfolio item too.

What it does is storing whatever process your server will do to create the view of every portfolio item, on a small storage piece, and leave it there for a while till it gets automatically deleted, or till you update the post.

By default, Transients are enabled. If you need to disable them here’s the place to do it.

When it may be useful to disable them? If you have some plugin that needs to access the post information prior to process, to output dynamic CSS or Javascript. In that case, it won’t work properly with transients enabled.

You can also refresh the stored data by clicking on Refresh Transients. It will empty the specific cached data for the portfolio posts.