Portfolio Zen Documentation

Please read the documentation below, especially the part relevant to installing and setting up Portfolio Zen for your version of Joomla.  Most confusion people have with Portfolio Zen occurs because they did not read these simple instructions.

How Portfolio Zen Works

Portfolio Zen allows a developer to set up an attractive portfolio that is easy for a client to manage. It does this by extracting an image and a paragraph from an article. Articles are organized into categories, which are the navigation headings for the component, and all categories within a given section(or parent category) are auto-magicaly pulled into the portfolio. Setting up Portfolio Zen is as easy as creating a section(or parent category for 1.6+), with sub-categories, and with one article per portfolio piece.

Get Started Joomla 1.5

  1. Install Portfolio Zen.
  2. Create a section for your portfolio in the Section Manager
  3. Create categories for your section in the Category Manager.  Each category will be a navigation item for your portfolio. 
  4. Create articles for your categories in the Article Manager.  Each article should be composed of a single image and a single paragraph. You can have more than one image and paragraph, but Portfolio Zen will only grab the first of each. 
  5. Create a new menu item for Portfolio Zen.  From the parameters, select your section, and your preferences. See the steps by checking out the component slideshow.

Get Started Joomla 1.6

  1. Install Portfolio Zen.
  2. Create a category for your portfolio in the Category Manager.
  3. Create sub-categories for your each navigation heading for your portfolio.
  4. Create articles for your sub-categories in the Article Manager. Each article should be composed of a single image and a single paragraph. You can have more than one image and paragraph, but Portfolio Zen will only grab the first of each.
  5. Create a new menu item for Portfolio Zen. From the parameters, select your containg category, and your preferences.

A Few Notes

  • Re-ordering items in the Category and Article Managers will alter the order in the portfolio navigation and the items order in the portfolio.
  • Paragraph's may include links, bolded, and italicized text.
  • Portfolio Zen doesn't modify image size unless you ask it to through the menu parameters.
  • Portfolio Zen requires PHP 5.
  • The Kite layout uses a fixed image size: 420 pixels x 420 pixels

Migrating to Portfolio Zen 2.0

 Portfolio Zen 2.0 uses a more accurate naming convention than 1.0 did. This means that if you're using the first version, when you upload this version, you will have two copies of the extension. The older one will be labeled in menus as Zenfolio and the newer one is labeled Portfolio Zen. My recommendation to you is to install the newest version, switch over your portfolio menu items to it, and then un-install the Zenfolio version using Joomla's extension manager once you've verified that everything is working well.

Customization

CSS Portfolio Zen's stylesheets are located in /components/com_portfoliozen/assets/css/. You can alter them directly, or overwrite the styles in your own template's css.  Portfolio Zen uses a slightly modified Dojo Slideshow widget. It is open to extension however, and any other Javascript framework should be able to use the server side code without modification.

Thank-you

 Thanks to the team behind the outstanding Joomla CMS and to the developers behind the Dojo Javascript Toolkit and Dojox Slideshow.  Thank-you also to the people who have contributed translations for Portfolio Zen: Juan Raul Garcia Canet and others.