What’s the portfolio and when to use it?

The idea behind the portfolio functionality is to allow you to showcase a collection of items in your site. Think of it as an online catalog.

While the most obvious purpose may be to showcase your work -hence its name-, you can actually use it for anything that you’ll want to display in a catalog fashion:

All sort of products, projects, classes, educational programs, members of a group, artists of a gallery, events, locations, albums, movies, books, reels, press releases, trips, packages, plays, cakes, etc.

Because it is a catalog, it has a very visual nature. Whatever you’ll be using it to, having proper graphic materials will make the items on the portfolio look good: photos, illustrations, mockups, posters, screen captures.

To start using the portfolio functionality you’ll first need to activate the Portfolio plugin that comes with your theme.

Go to Plugins in your WordPress backend and make sure the Portfolio plugin is installed and activated.

The Portfolio plugin will enable two main things in your site:

  • A new kind of post: the portfolio post.
  • A Portfolio module.

Similar to what a blog does with regular posts, the Portfolio module works in the same way with portfolio posts. It’ll showcase portfolio posts in different ways.

That means that the logic to build a portfolio on your site will be:

  1. Create portfolio posts
  2. Create a Portfolio module that will display those posts on the page you want it to be