Adding a Portfolio to Binary Moon using Jetpack

My old website projects page was a mess. It was basically a page containing a list of ‘things’ I had developed. Whether thats websites, WordPress themes, Games. There was all sorts of things there. But it wasn’t pretty – it was literally just a list of links. And I never updated it.

To be honest I should have improved this a long time ago. I did make a start, but data entry is boring, so I stopped. A couple of weeks ago I decided enough is enough so I spent a couple of evenings pulling everything together and creating my new portfolio. It was actually super simple.

There are two reasons I had been putting off sorting it out before.

1. I was using a custom theme that had no projects/ portfolio functionality.
2. Data entry is boring.

Point 1 was solved the day I installed Carmack on Binary Moon. Carmack is my latest WordPress theme, and it supports Jetpacks Portfolio Custom Post Type. All of my themes over the last year or so support Jetpacks Portfolio feature, and with every theme I have tweaked and improved how they integrate.

To set it up – all I had to do is install Jetpack (which I have running anyway), and then enter the projects through the WordPress admin. The beauty of using a plugin for this rather than baking the functionality into a theme is that my data will now transfer from theme to theme. Since all my themes going forwards will support Jetpack Portfolios – I won’t have to put any more effort into development than I would anyway.

Point 2 – I couldn’t program my way out of this one, but after 2 nights I had added everything. And now I have a nice maintainable portfolio system that I can add to and edit easily.

Now I have no excuse to let it fall into disrepair!