We’re very happy to introduce our newest plugin today: Portfolio Framework! Portfolio Framework is a powerful tool for web developers, designers, and artists that makes it easy to build and manage portfolio websites with WordPress. Portfolio Framework helps you organize your content and offers several options for display and navigation.

There’s no shortage of “Portfolio” style themes that offer some of the features of Portfolio Framework. The difference is that Portfolio Framework is a plugin that can be used with any theme. That includes the theme you’re already using on your site, your favorite development theme, or one of our free themes designed especially for Portfolio Framework. If you decide to change your theme in three months, no problem, all of your portfolio features will seamlessly integrate with your new site. We’ve developed a new responsive starter theme called Fiona which is optimized for Portfolio Framework and is available as a free download from our website.

The power of Portfolio Framework can be extended by the Portfolio Slideshow Pro, which we believe is the most flexible and powerful slideshow plugin available for WordPress. Portfolio Slideshow Pro is available at a discount when purchased together with Portfolio Framework.

Portfolio Framework isn’t just for artist websites! Portfolio Framework is great for any site with visual content that needs to be organized. That means real estate agencies, architects, movie poster collections—Portfolio Framework will speed up development time and impress visitors on any content-heavy site.

Portfolio Framework Features

• Organize your content with WordPress custom post types and custom taxonomies. Because we extend features that are already part of WordPress, you can continue to build on that foundation with your own plugins and custom features.
• Display your portfolio anywhere with a simple shortcode. You can personalize your portfolio with custom thumbnail sizes, display titles and excerpts, and crop images on the fly. The portfolio features a dynamic query which loads additional items and switches categories without needing to refresh the page.
• Three custom widgets: featured items, a flexible navigation widget, and a portfolio search widget.
• A shortcode for displaying your images called “Imagelist”. Imagelist can output all of the images attached to a portfolio entry in list or grid format, with thumbnails of any size, linked to lightbox images, all adjustable right from within the shortcode. Think of it as a turbocharged version of the WordPress “gallery” feature.
• Portfolio Framework was built from the ground up to integrate perfectly with Portfolio Slideshow Pro. Add beautiful, powerful slideshows to your portfolio with the most flexible slideshow tool available for WordPress.
• Portfolio Framework is mobile-friendly and works perfectly with responsive themes (like this one). It falls back gracefully for web clients without javascript, which is great for search engine optimization, too.
• Documentation is included right in the plugin settings page.
• We provide frequent updates based on your input and responsive support in our forum.

We hope you’ll take Portfolio Framework for a spin and use it to build your next portfolio website. Here’s a video introduction to the new plugin:

Portfolio Slideshow Pro 1.6, the latest version of our powerful and easy-to-use slideshow plugin for WordPress, is now available. Version 1.6 brings several major new features to the plugin as well as plenty of smaller improvements, bug fixes, and general awesomesauce.

Significant new features include:

• Inline videos: add a URL to a YouTube or Vimeo video to your slideshow image and the image will be replaced with an inline video player.
• Fullscreen galleries: use “click=fullscreen” to add a mobile-friendly, fullscreen gallery viewer to your slideshow. This feature is based on the amazing Photoswipe library.
• More intelligent image loading: Portfolio Slideshow Pro now only loads a few images at page load, significantly reducing bandwidth use and improving performance, especially on mobile devices. Images load in the background as you advance the slideshow.

More features: better default image quality, image cropping, thumbnails for popup galleries, more options for thumbnail toggle and FancyGrid slideshows, bug fixes and many improvements.

Get your copy of Portfolio Slideshow Pro here.

We’ve been using BBPress in our support forums for quite a while now, with generally good results. We started with BBPress 1.0 about a year ago, which was a standalone system, and upgraded to BBPress 2.0, which operates as a WordPress plugin, in January. The upgrade was a bit rocky, and to be honest I’ve been surprised at the lack of activity and documentation in the BBPress community. Considering that BBPress is the software behind the scenes in the support forums at WordPress.org, I would have thought more people would be actively maintaining and promoting it.

BBPress follows the WordPress model of creating a simple and solid platform for others to build upon with plugins and themes, and generally this is the philosophy I subscribe to as well. There aren’t a whole lot of plugins available for BBPress, but we’ve got anti-spam, auto-notifications, and a support ticketing add-on installed that give us most of the functionality we need. Two things we were sorely missing when we moved to BBPress 2.0, though: the ability to automatically close old posts after X days of inactivity, and the ability to paste code into the forum without losing the formatting or breaking our site. After digging around quite a bit, I’ve cobbled together this functionality and have created two plugins, which can both be found on GitHub.

Miohki Backticks properly formats and escapes code in BBPress topics, when wrapped in backticks, like this:

<?php echo "This code formatting will be preserved.";?>

BBPress Close Old Posts will automatically close old BBPress topics after X days of inactivity.

I didn’t write either of these but I’m putting them in a safe place in case anyone needs them.

If you can see this post, that’s good news! We moved our site to WP Engine this weekend and everything seems to have gone smoothly. Why did we move to WP Engine? We’ve been on a VPS for the last year, and while I’ve enjoyed the flexibility, in all honesty the site could be quite slow at times. My hope is that a speed boost will not only improve the site experience for users in general, but it might have an effect on sales conversions and SEO as well. Add on top of that the work required to manage backups, caching scripts, and everything else, and it seemed like it was the right time for a change.
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One of the challenges I’ve faced as I’ve been moving all of our web design to responsive layouts has been in dealing with vertically oriented images. Horizontal and square images work perfectly in responsive layouts because they are responding to the width of the browser. Vertical (portrait) images don’t respond quite as well in my experience, as they resize based on the width of the content area, often leaving you with images that are too tall for the space they need to occupy. This is something you’ll notice in our slideshow plugin if you’ve mixed vertical and horizontal images in a fluid layout.

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