Another Newbie wants to build a simple portfolio site

[phil_s]

Hi folks,

Another long-time Textpattern (and Textdrive VCII, anyone remember?) user here who wants to convert to Processwire. 

I've always felt the textpattern interface was rather unsuitable for non-blog sites with all its unused fields and options, and I'm really looking forward to getting familiar a new structure. I know my way around HMTL/CSS/Jquery, and I am learning/copying/pasting/googling PHP

Thanks to all the tutorials, documentation and fine users posting in here I think I've already started to get a grip on things, but I am still confused by some of the main ideas of processwire.

As a first project, I would like to build a simple portfolio single-site. It should have three sections: projects, exhibitions, and about.

- The projects sections should be a list of projects with each project entry containing Name, Year, Description, multiple imgs 

- Exhibitions should be a list of exhibitions, with each exhibition entry containing Name, Year and Description

- About should be a simple biography text (I'll leave this out from the detailed write-up below, think I can handle this..)

I can already see that Processwire is much more flexible than the article based approach that textpattern uses, and coming from the latter I suppose it simply takes some time to make sense of things… Anyways here's what I would do next or rather how I imagine processwire to function–I am not sure if this is the "right" way or order to do it so any input would be very much welcome!

1. Setup

- Set up the fields needed for the project and exhibition articles.

- Set up the templates needed for each of the articles pages (e.g. article_project, article_exhibition), add fields

- Set up the templates needed for each of the (invisible) overview pages (overview_projects, overview_exhibitions)

2. Pages

- Create the (invisible) Projects & Exhibitions pages, assigning each of the pages the overview_xxx templates I created

- Create subpages and assign them the article_xxx templates I created 

3. Structure/Code

- Create template file for the main page (e.g. index.php) and assign this to the home page in the backend

- Create foreach loops for both exhibitions and projects

Does that make any sense?

Looking forward to learning new things!

Cheers

Phil

[diogo]

Welcome Phil!

--

Makes all the sense! You described exactly how I would do it

For the portfolio pages don't forget to use Soma's Page List Image Label module.

...and I hope netcarver will show up to give you some tips on moving from txp to pw.

edit: if you want to keep using textile, he is the one maitaining the pw module. Could hardly get better

[pwired]

If you haven´t already, read through following thread, holds good jumpstart info:

http://processwire.com/talk/topic/3215-newbie-overwhelmed/

[phil_s]

Thanks guys, much appreciated!

Apologies for the late reply, I have been busy learning/building my first PW sites, hope to finish them soon.

For anybody just starting out I highly recommend this video Marty_Walker was kind enough to share, helped me understand the basics really quickly:

cheers