Hello everyone,

I’ve been coding away on building my new art website and was wondering if there are any other artists out there that are using EE to build their sites. I’ve hit some road blocks though and hopefully someone will be able to guide me in the right direction.

My site is not only a portfolio, but I also have a blog, contact, about, events page for upcoming shows, etc… The most difficult part is wanting to incorporate several different items into my portfolio. I want to be able to dynamically add new portfolio pieces, have different “views” of those pieces, then have a description of the piece, size, medium, etc.. and also directly tie in to being able to buy the artwork. All on one page.

Has anyone accomplished something like this? Could this be done with custom form fields? I still haven’t grasped the whole “dynamic image” thing, yet. Since there are about 5 for each piece.

Thanks to anyone that can point me in the right direction.

I am also working on a portfolio for my site so we may be able to help each other.  Though not all of this will be applicable to you, here is what I’m doing:

I’ve created an online resume with a “companies” weblog.  I created a separate weblog for “achievements” with a custom relationship field that relates each achievement to the appropriate company.  Now I can use the “reverse_related_entries” tag to show all the portfolio items associate with each company I’ve worked for.  Custom statuses let me exclude items I don’t want to show in the resume view (I can save some items for a dedicated portfolio page).

Hopefully this all makes sense so far…

NEXT, I created 3 more custom fields for relationships to gallery items.  This forces me to limit myself to three samples (or views, or screenshots, or whatever) per achievement.  I wish I could show you on my live site but it ain’t ready yet.

So…
- resumeCompanies weblog
  ( blurb about the company )
- resumeAchievements weblog
  ( blurb about the achievement )
  ( relationship to appropriate company )
  ( relationship to gallery item ) x3

Hope this helps!  With any luck, I’ll have something to show on the live site this weekend.  If that happens, I’ll post a link.

Hmmm…  I did a little playing around and found a major problem with the scheme I described.

I had a related_entries tag inside a reverse_related_entries tag which is finally inside a exp:weblog:entries tag.  EE does not accommodate this structure.  I was hoping that my related_entries tag would pull from the weblog specified in the reverse_related_entries and it does not.  Instead, it looks to the weblog specified in the exp:weblog:entries.

Unless anyone can suggest a work-around for this, I guess I will have to find an elegant way to do the same thing using categories.  I suspect the category approach will be just as elegant but I haven’t explored it yet (all the category options still confuse me).

I did mine with a category group and two weblogs.

- Each client is a category.
- One weblog holds company/project overview, link, and testimonial.
- The other weblog holds screen captures and blurbs.

Then one category page can pull one category from two weblogs and pull the overview together with variable number of paginated screenshots.

“Featured” is another category - which determines which projects appear on the home page and top of the portfolio page.

This was done pre EE 1.6, now you could put all the company overview / link / testimonial in as custom category fields.

Thanks Michael, I’ve been admiring your site ever since discovering EE a couple of months ago.  Your blog has been very helpful!

Since I am starting at EE 1.6.0, I have relationships at my disposal from the get-go…  and would really like to use them to link to my portfolio items in the image gallery.  If I can get it to work, I should never have to worry about moving or renaming gallery items and breaking links (like I would if I just used a custom field line containing a URL to point to the image).

The trouble is that related_entries only seems to work in very exact circumstances.  I’ll keep playing with it and post what I learn.