Update (02/09/10): I’ve noticed that development has stalled out on Flutter. I’d recommend checking out the Pods plug-in, which has very similar functionality and appears to be better supported. Also read this article about how to create custom write panels (reviews of various plug-ins).
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Tyler Sticka did a great presentation at WordCamp Portland today about how to create your own portfolio website. Since I had just created one for this site, I was curious how he approached it and if our techniques varied much. It turns out, besides using posts rather than pages, they were fairly similar. And that got me thinking- there must be an easier way to do this. Why are we uploading our images to the media gallery and then pasting them into a custom field? What would work better?
WordCamp is an amazing resource for picking up tips and learning about new plug-ins. One that kept coming up in conversation was Flutter, a powerful plug-in that adds additional CMS functionality to WordPress. Maybe this is the silver bullet for creating an easy to use portfolio page?
Here’s three 5-minute videos that walk through the process. I apologize if it rambles a bit, or is slightly incoherent. It’s off the cuff, and getting late, and not meant to be the perfect tutorial. It’s more to get the discussion started. Has anyone used Flutter like this? Are there downsides to the plug-in? Please leave a comment and let me know.
The screencasting tool I used had a strange embed method, so just open the links in a new tab to view:
How to Use Flutter to Create a Portfolio Page (Part 1)
How to Set up Options (Part 2)
What the Template Looks Like (Part 3)
6 Comments
Hey Devin,
Just watched your tutorial videos on flutter. Really helpful. I want to dig into the custom field options more on my portfolio and this looks like a good way to go. Thanks for sharing. Maybe see you at the next Beer and Blog!
cheers,
jg
Hey Jacob. I’m glad you found it useful. I’ll try to get a more concise version up in the next few days and post actual code for the templates. Look forward to comparing notes over a beer!
@Devin,
Thanks for the awesome tutorial. I just came across Flutter tonight and was instantly intrigued by its capability, but frustrated by lack of documentation. Your vids fixed that!
I would love to see more of your templating structure in regards to Flutter. I’m very interested in how the EIP (Edit in place) capabilities work.
Thanks!
Hey Devin,
Thanks for this awesome tutorial.. Just what I was looking for! tutorials like this are of great help…
Thanks!
Thanks Devin, Excellent tutorial..I found it very hard finding a screen cast on this …thx so much keep up the good work will be watching this site more closely.
Fantastic tutorial thank you!
One Trackback
[...] I had to see what it was all about so I instantly downloaded the plugin and started looking for documentation. It is scarce! Thanks to Devin at WordpressTheming.com for providing a few video tutorials on implementing Flutter for a design portfolio. [...]