About this website

This website had to fulfill two main requirements, first of all, to be a an online portfolio and second, to serve as my main blogging platform. I’ve had both of these in the past, but they were spread out at different places and different services. I needed something that I can update easily.

I already had some experience with WordPress while working on my watch related website. I really liked the back-end, I found it to be a lot more user friendlier than Drupal and Joomla. Unlike with WatchPaper, I wanted to create theme from scratch, or at least almost from scratch. I started by reading Beginning WordPress 3, by Stephanie Leary, a really good book for discovering hidden aspects of WP. I also had a better understanding of how should I go for the theme development.

My other source of information was the WordPress Codex, a very well written documentation from the WordPress community. I started from the TwentyTen theme, that comes with WordPress, but instead of developing a child theme, I rather used it as a model took bits from here and there. When I got stuck, I would turn to online forums, blogs and articles. Most of the time I would find the answer to my question really fast, proof of the maturity and popularity of this platform.

Some of the features that I needed to look up:

Displaying the image title and description

For the portfolio pages, I wanted to take advantage of the meta info, such as image title and image description that we can add in the back-end when uploading images. Strangely there was no native function to display these, so I needed to find a way to have it written in the functions.php. Luckily I found exactly what I needed on this blog and followed Chris Murphy’s comment, who fine-tuned the solution described by newvibes.

Pagination

I also needed tweaking the pagination and I ended up getting the solution to my problem here.

Considering that I have minimal knowledge of PHP, I’m pretty happy with the result. I know there is still a lot to do, to make it perfect and I’m looking forward to fixing all the bugs that I know of, or that will pop-up as this websites grows.