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Pages vs. Portfolio Items

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Started 3 months ago by deannamc
Latest reply from deannamc
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deannamc
Member

Hi,
I am new to WordPress and just purchased the Velvet theme. For the most part, I'm getting the hang of it. I'm a UI designer and I'm using my website primarily as a portfolio, so I've created several portfolio-items and I like the way they look with the little card-style background. However, the sidebar seems to only point to "pages" and not "portfolio-items". The sidebar theme options asks which "page" do you want a sidebar on. My portfolio-items already have a sidebar (which is good), but how do I customize what goes in there? I want it to link to portfolio-items, not pages, categories, and archives.

What is the difference between pages and portfolio-items and does it matter which I use?

Currently can be seen at http://www.deannamccusker.com/wordpress. My ISP put it there and I'm planning to move it up to deannamccusker.com when it's ready. (Not sure how to create a sandbox environment.)

Thanks in advance,
Deanna

Posted 3 months ago #
Ismael
Moderator

Hi,

Go Velvet > Theme Options > Sidebar > Select a PAGE that should receive a new widget area:, select your portfolio page. Next, go to Apperance > Widgets, you will see a new widget area for your portfolio page. Supply that with widgets.

Regards,
Ismael

Posted 3 months ago #
deannamc
Member

So I selected the Portfolio PAGE in the Sidebar options area, then went to Appearance > Widgets. (Individual portfolio-items are not in this list.) There I see an additional listing on the right called "Page: Portfolio". I added "Pages" to it and titled it "Projects". PAGES are displayed on my individual portfolio-item pages with the title "Pages" (not Projects) and the content contains only PAGES (Home, Blog, Portfolio, etc.) not PORTFOLIO-ITEMS. I tried creating a Custom Menu, but still, the default Pages, Categories and Archives are the only things displayed in my sidebar. This Portfolio page does not seem to be affecting the individual portfolio-items pages.

What I want is a sidebar on the individual portfolio-items pages that links to each other portfolio-item so that the user doesn't have to jump back to the portfolio page and back for each item.

Posted 3 months ago #
deannamc
Member

Ah, I found the Velvet Latest Portfolio sidebar widget, which looks like the thing I want. I added it to Pages:Portfolio. Didn't work. I tried putting it in Sidebar Pages, but that didn't work either. Nothing I'm doing is changing my sidebar.

Thanks in advance for your help.

Deanna

Posted 3 months ago #
Devin
Moderator

Hi Deanna,

The portfolio items use the Widget area "Sidebar Blog". You can then use a plugin like http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/widget-logic-visual/ to add additional logic to make it so only certain widgets show on the different post type pages.

Additionally, you could modify the theme files and create a new single template and widget area for the portfolio items but it isn't something we could walk you through.

Regards,

Devin

Posted 3 months ago #
deannamc
Member

Thanks, that worked. Is this in the documentation somewhere? It would not have occurred to me to try that. I see that this means that the portfolio-items pages and the blog share a sidebar. That seems odd.

More importantly, because it is a blog sidebar, it seems to treat the portfolio-items as blog entries and posts the date they were published. Is there any way to remove this publish date from the sidebar? I don't want my static portfolio items to contain dates.

Another (somewhat) unrelated question - I now have 3 portfolio-item pages, 2 of which show the sidebar along the full side of the page (including the header image) and 1 shows the header image across the whole page with the sidebar starting below. I would prefer the first style (sidebar appearing along the full side of the page. I'm not sure why these are different, but can you tell me how to adjust them?

I'm getting very close to having this site look the way I want!

Thanks,
Deanna

Posted 3 months ago #
Dude
Dude

1) It seems like you already solved the date issue? I couldn't find any meta data (comments, date, etc.) on the portfolio pages.

2) Please check your slideshow options. Make sure that "Image slideshow?" - "Default Small" is selected and make sure that no dynamic template is used for the portfolio page.

Posted 3 months ago #
deannamc
Member

No, I did not resolve the date issue. My portfolio-item sidebar contains a small thumbnail with the portfolio-item title and date it was published to the right of the thumbnail. I want the title, but not the date. In the widget area, it asks if you want a title only, or title and excerpt. It seems the date goes along with the title. I just want a title with no date. How do I do that?

Thanks,
Denana

Posted 3 months ago #
Nick
Moderator
Hi,

To remove the date you can add this to your /css/custom.css file
```
a .news-time, a:hover .news-time {
display: none;
}
```
-

Sidebars vs. Widgets

The direction Wordpress design is heading will have (in my opinion) only 1 sidebar/widget-area for each 'physical location' on the page for the entire site. So instead of having 50 different right sidebars there will be only one right sidebar shared among all posts/pages/archives. Within that single sidebar, there will be multiple instances of widgets , assigned to be displayed when certain conditional statements are met. ( http://codex.wordpress.org/Conditional_Tags#Conditional_Tags_Index )

The deficiency of the 'custom sidebar/widget-area model' is already becoming a noticeable problem. It's redundant, static and not scalable. By its very definition, the only condition that triggers a sidebar or a widget-area is the type of page the end user is visiting. right-sidebar-portfolio-item and right-sidebar-blog-post only allow the developer to decide what sidebar (already prepacked with widgets) to display on what particular page.

Though at first glance that may seem dynamic, further examination reveals that the model is more on the static side. Its very likely that the two sidebars share at least one widget, that is needlessly repeated over and over again for every new sidebar. This goes against DRY design.

Factors such as whether to show the user the same or a different widget when the condition is true for: visitor is logged in/or not, visitor is from Malaysia, show one widget if its after 8pm in Malaysia and another if after 8am, if visitor's shopping cart has specific items in it... Such robust functionality is possible without redundancy when conditional statements determine which widget to display and not which sidebar to display.

All this is already possible now with Widget Logic (or competitor plugin). So a sidebar shared between multiple pages in a single site can (a) be overridden with a custom sidebar/widget area via a plugin or custom code (the past) or the widgets themselves can become dynamic based on conditional statements (the future). So when you see a sidebar shared among multiple page types, you are looking towards the future! :)

Thanks,

Nick
Posted 3 months ago #
deannamc
Member

Thanks, much better! And thanks for the information, that's helpful.

I've had a lot of questions and I've been impressed with the quick responses you guys have been providing.

Deanna

Posted 3 months ago #

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