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How Portfolios Work In Avada

Last Update: March 20, 2023

A portfolio is a collection of creative work intended to demonstrate a person’s ability, to a potential employer, or customer. And so websites often have a great need for such collections. Whether you are a web designer, graphic designer, photographer, artist, or in fact anyone who creates a body of work, you will probably want to display your work in a well-presented collection on your website.

With Avada, we make this possible with the Portfolio Custom Post Type and the Portfolio Element. There is also the possibility to make a custom Portfolio layout with Avada Layouts.

Watch the video below and read the full set of Portfolio documents to get a clear idea of how best to use this powerful, and very flexible, set of tools. Just note that this video below covers the pre Avada Layouts methods. You can still create your Portfolios this way, but with Avada Layouts, you now have the freedom to create your own layouts, while still using the Custom Post Type for the portfolio items. See the Creating Custom Portfolio Layouts With Avada Layouts video for more details on this method.

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The Portfolio Custom Post Type

The first thing to understand about setting up a portfolio is that the portfolio is a custom post type in Avada, in the same way the blog or FAQ is. So, setting up a Portfolio requires you to create Portfolio items, and then you display them on your site in various ways, by using the Portfolio Element, much like we create individual blog posts and then use the Blog Element to display them on our pages.

The Portfolio Custom Post Type is similar to the ‘Post’ Post Type in WordPress. It gathers your portfolio items together and provides options for Categories, Skills, and Tags, which allow for further filtering and sorting down the track. Categories and Skills can also be customized with language files if you want to have your own personalized headings.

The Portfolio Custom Post Type and the Portfolio Element, together with the Avada Global Options and the Avada Page Options, offer an enormously wide range of choices, to give you a multitude of ways you can set up a Portfolio on your Avada site.

Overview of the Portfolio Process

In the other documents in the Portfolio Category, as you can see on the left hand side of the page, we break down the process of building a Portfolio into their individual steps, but in broad terms, to create a Portfolio on your Avada site, you will follow this general process:

  • Decide how you want to layout & display your portfolio items. There is a huge range of layout and display options with Portfolios. There are layout choices when working with the Single Portfolio Posts, and many display options when working with both the Global Options and the Portfolio Element. A good place to start is to check out the various Portfolio examples shown under the Portfolio Menu item on the Avada Demo Site.

    Most of the examples show the various display possibilities with the Portfolio Element, but the Single Post Layouts show the various configurations available with the Single Portfolio Posts. The “Our Work” section of the Agency Demo also is a great place to see what can be done with Portfolio posts. Watch the video at the top of the page for a detailed rundown of how that demo is using the Portfolio.

  • Create your individual Portfolio posts. These are the individual items in your portfolio. Each website, painting, sculpture, etc, needs its own portfolio post. The following documents go into much more detail on this process, but there is enormous flexibility here, both for how things are laid out, and options of using Categories, Skills, and Tags for further filtering and sorting.

  • Use the Portfolio Element to display your collection on your site. Once you have created your individual Single Portfolio Posts, you use the Portfolio Element to display them on your site. Again, there is enormous flexibility here, with innumerable, easy to use display options. The Displaying Portfolio Posts On Your Site document looks at all the possibilities.

The Portfolio options in Avada are amongst the most powerful and flexible in the theme. But Portfolios themselves are the cornerstone of some sites, and so we have created a system that provides the necessary muscle and flexibility to cover almost any scenario. Make sure you read the remaining Portfolio docs to see how this great system can work for you.

Disabling The Portfolio Custom Post Type

If you wish to disable the Portfolio Post Type entirely, just head to Options > Advanced > Post Types, and here you can turn the Portfolio post types off. This will disable the Post type and remove it from the menu.

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