Portfolio CMS advice?

R

Rutland yO

New Member
I have just started university and will be wanting to update my website a lot with all my new work ect, the thing is i have always designed and coded my own websites, but with all this new work, deadlines and partys coming up, i want a decent CMS that is suitable for a portfolio, the only pages i really care about is a homepage, portfolio page and a contact page. Iv looked over a few but can't seem to find any i like, is anyone on here using one and if so what one?

Thanks.
 
Hello. My site is based on Wordpress. Just google 'wordpress portfolio themes' and see what you get.
Mine is customised, but there are lots of great looking off-the-shelf ones.
 
I find ModX CMS is very good. User friendly and quick to update with a really flexible method for plumbing in your own design. That said Wordpress is good too and so is Drupal (there we go, that's my full set of CMS experience). Here's a ridiculously long list...

AdaptCMS Lite
Avactis
ATutor PHP
b2evolution
BEdita PHP
BLOG:CMS
CivicSpace
CMS Made Simple
Concrete5
Dotclear
Drupal
DynPG
e107
Exponent CMS
eZ Publish
Frog CMS
Gamboo Web Suite
ImpressCMS
Joomla!
Habari PHP
KnowledgeTree Document Management System
Mambo PHP
Merlintalk
MiaCMS PHP
Midgard CMS
MODx PHP
MySource Matrix (Squiz)
Nucleus CMS
Ocportal
Opus PHP
PHP-Fusion
PHP-Nuke
PHPSlash
phpWebSite
Pixie (CMS)
RavenNuke CMS
Serendipity
SilverStripe
SPIP
TangoCMS
Textpattern
Tiki Wiki CMS Groupware
Tribiq CMS
TYPO3 PHP
whCMS PHP
WordPress
Website Baker
Xaraya PHP
XOOPS PHP
Zikula

Let us know what you decide on. All should leave you time to party though :)
 
Agreed, WordPress sounds like your best bet. It is:

Very user friendly. Fast. Easy to template and switch between templates. If it cant do something you want, it's likely there's a free (most are free) plugin that will get it done for you.

Let us know which you choose and how you get on :)

/Doug
 
pcbranding said:
Hello. My site is based on Wordpress. Just google 'wordpress portfolio themes' and see what you get.
Mine is customised, but there are lots of great looking off-the-shelf ones.
Click to expand...

I would never have thought Graphic design | Logo design | Retail brand identity | Packaging graphics | Ramsgate, Kent | Paul Cartwright Branding was built on WordPress...cool

I've only just installed WordPress (been using tumblr.com for a while), applied a theme and I've got a lot to get my head around with it so any good places for sound info would be nice?
 
I like it, especially as it is far from obvious that it's built from WP but has all the functionality and ease you need I bet. Just what the doc ordered...
 
Wordpress is my CMS of choice as well. I've been designing and coding with it for a few years and it's never let me down.
If your interested in learning how to code for it then I would recommend a 3 part video series called "Designing for WordPress". You can find it here. The guy doing the tutorials is a real guru on all things Wordpress related :)
 
After spending a couple of days with WordPress I think I've got a much better understanding of it. It's not so much the app I'm confused with but more the way ppl integrate it into their sites.



Looking at your site PCB it looks like the home page is not part of WordPress, that the actual blog page is hidden and that the navigation is actually the categories\tags applied to each post. So, if this is right, this page Flaiver | Women’s fashion brand logo | Paul Cartwright Branding is a blog post and you link to this from the categories on the left?

Is this about right?

How many pages on your site are not part of WordPress?

If you add a new blog post from the dashboard, I assume that a link to the post\permalink will be added to the navigation automatically and not effect any of the other pages, is this right?
 
sweetums said:
Wordpress is my CMS of choice as well. I've been designing and coding with it for a few years and it's never let me down.
If your interested in learning how to code for it then I would recommend a 3 part video series called "Designing for WordPress". You can find it here. The guy doing the tutorials is a real guru on all things Wordpress related :)
Click to expand...

Thanks for the link, I'll check that out for sure...been doing some lynda.com training on the subject and have a book in the post so I should be well versed by the end of all that :)
 
The whole site is wordpress. It's unusual in the respect that you don't have a continual list of posts....in fact each post becomes it's own page and yes, new posts are added to the menu in whichever of the 4/5 categories I allocate them to.
 
pcbranding said:
The whole site is wordpress. It's unusual in the respect that you don't have a continual list of posts....in fact each post becomes it's own page and yes, new posts are added to the menu in whichever of the 4/5 categories I allocate them to.
Click to expand...

Cool, I'm getting a better understanding of how it all fits together but have more questions :)

Do you apply any HTML formatting when you create a new post or do you just enter the title, text, images and publish and let the template take care of it?

Do you have more than one template to chose from when you publish?

Cheers
 
Generally in Wordpress everything is based around a template, so you either need to find a 'theme' of which there are 1000s...good and bad, free and not, which suits what you need or you have someone develop one for you.

My site requires a shortcode for creating the 2x blocks of text at the top of each post, but I expect that could be coded in by a clever chap.

Best thing to do, is to set up Wordpress on your web host and just have a play. It takes a while to get used to what does what, but it's really like a scrapbook...you type the words, upload the images and most of the styling is done for you. Obviously there is more to it than that, but there doesn't have to be to get a site up and running.
 
pcbranding said:
Generally in Wordpress everything is based around a template, so you either need to find a 'theme' of which there are 1000s...good and bad, free and not, which suits what you need or you have someone develop one for you.

My site requires a shortcode for creating the 2x blocks of text at the top of each post, but I expect that could be coded in by a clever chap.

Best thing to do, is to set up Wordpress on your web host and just have a play. It takes a while to get used to what does what, but it's really like a scrapbook...you type the words, upload the images and most of the styling is done for you. Obviously there is more to it than that, but there doesn't have to be to get a site up and running.
Click to expand...

Thanks, I guess I didn't make myself too clear...I've already installed WP3 on my PC (running WAMP) and on my web server. I am very familiar with using the dashboard and all its funtionality and am already building my own theme so I have a pretty good understanding of how WP works, I also have previous experience working with php and mysql db's, as well as HTML and CSS so my questions aren't about WP itself.

I was just asking specifics about 'how it works for you'

I saw that you were using two columns in your posts but as this isn't a standard feature within the dashboard, I wondered if someone had built this into the theme they created for you, or whether you applied formatting to the post yourself via the dashboard as you can apply you own HTML to the post.

The question about having more than one template, wasn't clear. I was thinking of when one adds a new page not a new post. I have created a new page template already so when I go to create a new page I have a selection of page templates to choose from. (note the difference: template not theme, they are different)
 
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You're right - you didn't explain yourself! :)

The columns feature is a plugin which I access by adding a shortcode into each post.

I know what a template/theme are...I was attempting to keep things basic (believing that you were new to Wordpress.)
 
Maybe it was a combination of me not explaining myself to well and the assumption that I'm new to WP so don't know what I'm talking about ;)

So it's a plugin that gives you formatting capabilities...interesting

I haven't looked at the extensive range of plugins yet...thought I'd get a better understanding of how all the php\css\html works together first as web design\dev is the area I work in most

Thanks for your help
 
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