Portfolio

The Portfolio screen is where a site shows its work: a wedding, a client project, a renovation, a case study. Each item has a title, a line of summary, a cover picture and a story, and gets a page of its own on your site. The screen is in every site’s sidebar, because it is also where you start one.

Starting a portfolio

A site without a portfolio yet shows a Start a portfolio box with an address, /portfolio unless you type another, such as /work or /cases. Starting one adds two pages on Pages:

• Portfolio item, the page each item is shown with. It goes live straight away, and it shows nothing until an item is published.
• Portfolio, the page at that address that lists every item. It waits on the draft branch, so you can look at it and ask your agent to change it before you merge it.

If your site already has a page at that address, it is kept as it is and no second list is added. Your agent can also build a portfolio for you, in which case the screen opens on the items straight away.

Adding and editing items

Add an item opens a form built from your portfolio’s own table. Title, summary, cover, story, published date and place are always there; anything else your agent added shows up too. The story opens in the same visual editor a post’s body does, with its headings, lists, images and Markdown switch (see Posts), and Preview shows it in your site’s own look.

The pencil on a card opens the item again. An edit to a live item is live as soon as you save it.

The cover picture

Choose picture opens your Disk. Pick a file that is already there, or upload one there and then, and it becomes the cover. Remove picture clears the cover and leaves the file on your Disk. Anything you upload is public at your site’s address as soon as it lands on Disk, before the item is published.

The cover is shown on the item’s card here, at the top of its page, and on the list, depending on what your pages draw. It is also the picture a shared link to the item shows, and the summary is the sentence under it and the description search engines get. An item without either falls back to the page’s own.

Deleting a file from your Disk does not change the item that shows it. Its card shows an empty frame, the editor says the file is no longer on your Disk, and your site leaves the picture out. Choose another picture for the item, or remove it.

Publishing

An item works like a post. Nothing is live until it has a published date and that day has come. Fill one in on the form, or use the publish button on the card, which fills in today. A date still to come schedules the item: the card says Scheduled for that day, and the item appears on your site by itself when the day starts, at midnight UTC. The publish button puts a scheduled item out today instead. Clearing the date takes an item back off your site.

As with posts, that date is the rule a portfolio starts with, and the Publish setting on its table under Database can change it.

Each card says whether its item is Live, Scheduled for a day, or Not published. Once visitors can open an item, its card has a link to it on your site. Until then it has none.

The order

Your portfolio is in the order you set, not by date. The arrows on a card move it one step up or down, across pages too, and the list on your site follows. A new item goes to the end. The Place box on the form holds the same number, lowest first, but the arrows are the easier way to change it.

If your agent writes a listing that sorts the items some other way, that listing’s order wins on that page.

Addresses

Each item answers at the portfolio’s address plus its slug, so an item called “A courtyard wedding in Potsdam” in a portfolio at /work is at /work/a-courtyard-wedding-in-potsdam. Slugs are filled in, typed and changed the way a post’s are (see Posts, “Addresses”), and changing one stops the old address working.

Until the Portfolio item page is live, every item answers 404, and the screen says so above the cards. The same goes for the list while its page is still waiting on a branch. A portfolio your agent built without an item page has no addresses at all: the items can still be listed, but not opened one by one.

Deleting

The bin on a card deletes the item after a confirmation, and its address stops answering. There is no undo. Its cover stays on your Disk.

Languages

An item is written in one language. If your site speaks two, write the item once in each and ask your agent to add a language field to the table, so each visitor is shown the items in the language they are reading.

A portfolio has no feed. Your blog’s feed is for posts alone.