Portfolio Zen Documentation

Most confusion people have with Portfolio Zen occurs because they did not read these simple instructions, so please take a few minutes to review them.

How Portfolio Zen Works

Portfolio Zen looks through a category of articles and extracts an image and a paragraph each to build a slideshow. Categories form the navigation headings for the slideshow and a parent category (or section for Joomla 1.5) acts as a container for what categories will be included.

Get Started Joomla 2.5

  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.
    Portfolio Zen Category Structure
  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.
    Portfolio Zen Article Source
  5. Create a new menu item for Portfolio Zen. From the parameters, select your containing category, and your preferences.
    Portfolio Zen Menu Parameters

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.

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

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.