Project Photo is a site I created a while back to mange photography projects that I was working on.  At that time the site was hand coded using PHP and MySQL to drive the site – complete with an administration area to mange photographers, categories, sub categories, and images. After my daughter was born, photography fell to the side but the desire to convert the site to WordPress was just something I needed to try.

WordPress would allow more features, more flexibility with less changes in code, and hopefully the inspiration to get back into photography for myself.

Design

The design is based on the old website which was minimal so the visitor can focus on the images.

Main Page

Category and Project Pages

The projects are grouped by year or ongoing in order to make use of WordPress category pages. Clicking on a project would display the images, project description and project details – some of which were handled with custom fields.

Project Page

Attachment Page

Clicking an image on the project page would display the large version of the image on its own page along with links to the previous and next image in the series.  This needed a custom function in the WordPress functions.php file in order to only link to images in the current project.

Attachment Page

Custom Plugin/Widget

Custom Widget - Full

A custom widget was needed in order to display the projects.  I needed a widget that would:

• Allow me to select a parent category (this parent category could not be a sub-category)
• Display all sub categories (which would link to the appropriate category page)
• Display a selected number of posts from each sub category (which linked to the project page)
• Be usable more than once in the widget area (multi-use widget)

Conclusion

Re-creating the Project Photo website in WordPress turned out to be an excellent idea. In doing this project I developed a number of common functions that I’ve been using in client work over and over again. This is probably the most ‘plain’ looking theme I’ve designed but it require the most custom coding of any WordPress project to date.

Website: www.project-photo.com