Okay, truth: I’m posting this in 2021. But the content belongs in 2018. I knew I’d neglected my blog that year, and that I didn’t manage to post anything in 2019, and 2020 was, well, 2020, but I was still surprised I hadn’t posted this, given that I reprised the presentation at the East Bay WordPress Meetup…where it turns out I did at least post my talk description.
I’m back-dating the post because the specifics about the code and the state of Gutenberg are anchored firmly in 2018, before Gutenberg was part of WordPress Core. It seemed like that process was taking forever, but WordPress 5.0 was actually released in time for WordCamp US 2018.
What People Came to This Talk to Learn
The purpose of a portfolio is to convince prospects to work with you. Whether your service is photography, design, development, or construction, your portfolio needs more than beautiful images. If you’re going to convince people to hire you and not your competition, you can’t just show people what you built. You need to explain the business problems you helped your clients solve and the outcomes you helped them achieve.
The first and most important step in creating your portfolio is determining what to put in it, which means knowing who your ideal client is and what they care about. But after you’ve done the content strategy work, what then? How do you create a portfolio with the elements you need, without adding unnecessary features? How do you make it easy for yourself to add new projects? And can you create it without hiring a developer?
It’s already possible to use code to customize WordPress portfolio plugins, and to use page builders to create layouts for portfolio archives and single entries. Those methods will both have a place for some time to come, but the new block-based Gutenberg editor provides a new way to build a portfolio template, and it might be even easier to use than a page-builder.
This session will review the elements of a good portfolio and explain how to combine core blocks and custom blocks into reusable block templates. The speaker will also address the question of where you might still prefer a page-builder and where you might need a developer — at least in the short term. You’ll walk away with a better understanding of how Gutenberg can make it easier to promote your business effectively.
Slides: Building a Compelling Portfolio with Gutenberg
Code Samples
I’d actually forgotten that I’d created a whole repository and not just a Gist. One of these days I’ll clone it and set it up to work with the current version of WordPress. (Whatever that version may be.)
It’s important to know that the code as written will cause a fatal error. I might manage to fix that bit on GitHub, but I might not.
The Complete Plugin
As the summary says (if the embed is working correctly), this plugin creates the portfolio post type and the portfolio taxonomies.
block-portfolio (this link opens in a new window) by wpfangirl (this link opens in a new window)
Block-Based Portfolio is a WordPress plugin that creates a portfolio CPT (and 3 portfolio taxonomies) and uses a block template to pre-populate new portfolio entries with Gutenberg blocks
Block Template for the Portfolio Post Type Plugin
This code may be somewhat more useful in 2021 than the other, because it lets you start with an existing portfolio plugin and add a block template if it doesn’t have one. Though by now, it probably does.
gutenberg-ppt (this link opens in a new window) by wpfangirl (this link opens in a new window)
Plugin to add Gutenberg support and a block template to Devin Price’s Portfolio Post Type plugin
I had these big plans to update my portfolio that year and use this for it. It didn’t work out that way.
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