Navigation issues when viewing portfolio items

[cedricstudio]

Two problems I hope are easy to solve:

1. In the Portfolio I have a page where I have the option to filter images by Portfolio Tag. Let’s say I have two tags: “Tag A” and “Tag B”, and for the sake of example lets say the tags alternate every other image. When viewing thumbnails, if I click the “Tag A” filter all the “Tag B” thumbnails disappear and now I only see every other image. Great! So I click on an image to view it in the lightbox. Then I start clicking the right arrow and the next image is a “Tag B” image. How can I get the filter to apply to the lightbox display of the images? Am I doing something wrong or is this a bug in the theme?

2. I want to have a Portfolio page where clicking on a thumbnail brings you to an Item Page instead of to a lightbox display. Once I get to the Item Page, I want there to be navigation options to click right or left to go to the next item, and also something I can click to go back to the thumbnails. However, I don’t see anywhere where this is an option. Am I missing something?

Thanks in advance.

Topic

[Jason Bobich]

Hello,

Unfortunately, I don’t really have any easy solution for you.

1. I totally understand what you’re getting at, and no you’re not doing anything wrong. However, the problem is that filtering the display of the posts and the functionality of the lightbox are two separate things. But I can definitely see your point, and will look into for a future update to see if I can come up with a solution.

2. Apologies, but there is no feature in the theme for what you’re wanting to do. Besides the obvious of there not being a link to go to the next item, the big problem here in even attempting to add this from your own child theme code customization is that I think you’re overlooking the lack of connection between your portfolio page and the individual portfolio items.

When you view an individual portfolio item, you’re viewing a WordPress single post. However, when you create a custom portfolio page (or any custom display of posts, for that matter), the theme framework is giving you such a robust way to gather a specific group of posts and display them in different styles, order, etc. But then, once you click off to the individual portfolio item (single post), what is there to connect how those posts were displayed on that random portfolio page you’re coming from?

For example, imagine you create one portfolio page that includes posts from tag A and B, ordered by the post title. Then you create another portfolio page that includes posts from all tags, A, B, C, and D, ordered chronologically. Now, when you view an individual item from tag A, where should this “Next Item” link to? So, you can see the dilemma. There are just so many ways you can set all this up. So if the theme had an option like that, it would limit other factors of the theme — for example requiring you to setup a single portfolio, chronologically ordered, and that’s it.

---

I think your bigger issue is that you’re looking to make some sort hierarchal connection between your portfolio items and the portfolio, for the website visitor. So, one thing you can look at doing is activating the breadcrumbs throughout your site. You can do this from Appearance > Theme Options > Layout > Extras, and this will create more standard form of navigational hierarchy throughout your site.

Now, with that after you set it up, you’re going to run into a similar issue where the breadcrumbs on a portfolio item (single post) are not going to connect to the random page you’ve built a portfolio at. And so this plugin was created for that:

https://wordpress.org/plugins/theme-blvd-post-to-page-link/

[cedricstudio]

Thanks very much for the prompt and thorough reply!

1. Thanks for being open to my suggestion. Would love to see this fixed in a future update!

2. Your explanation makes sense. I know there are a lot of other portfolio themes that allow you to click to view a post and then arrow to the next one (in fact I assumed this was common in all portfolio themes), but I can see how that might require a trade-off in terms of the amount of filtering you can do. Would it be possible to add a feature that allows this functionality but with a warning telling people that if they enable this feature it will disable filtering? For me, having this feature would be much more important than the filtering. It’s almost a deal breaker for me in using the theme.

The breadcrumbs option is a helpful suggestion, although personally I find them to be unattractive and to add visual clutter. But I’m an artist so I’m more picky than most about that stuff.

[Jason Bobich]

1. I was able to figure this out earlier this morning; so it’s in there for the next update.

2. Apologies, but this is most likely not something I will add to the theme, partly for the reasons I explained above.

But if you’re looking to just add next/previous post links that just work chronologically, you can do it pretty easily through your own child theme customization. You’d utilize use WordPress functions previous_post_link() and next_post_link().

https://codex.wordpress.org/Function_Reference/previous_post_link

https://codex.wordpress.org/Function_Reference/next_post_link

There are several ways you could implement this, but here’s an example of what you could do it from your child theme‘s functions.php:

/**
 * Add links to next/previous posts at
 * the bottom of portfolio item posts.
 */
function my_post_links() {
    if ( is_singular('portfolio_item') ) {
        ?>
        <div class="post-links">
            <span class="alignleft">
                <?php previous_post_link(); ?>
            </span>
            <span class="alignright">
                <?php next_post_link(); ?>
            </span>
        </div>
        <?php
    }
}
add_action('themeblvd_single_footer', 'my_post_links', 5);

[cedricstudio]

Thanks! I appreciate the suggestion.

[Author]

Replies