I have a bit of a dilemma. I was experimenting with creating my own themes and I find myself at a crossroad when trying decide which strategy to use for Portfolio pages, for example.
Lets say… you had a portfolio which broke down into 4 or 5 logical sections. Something like: Portfolio–>Fiction/ Biographies / Technical/ Poetry/ Childrens
I want to have a final outcome be a document which looks the same for all sections of the portfolio, but display ONLY the post of that section ( in other words, clicking next while looking at a poem wont spill you in to children lit).
For ease of entering the data … I could make a category :Portfolio which has 5 sub categories.
I could create a PAGE that merely READS from the categories and sub categories. This is great for having the “Portfolio” link on the main menu ( an auto-generated list of WP-pages) but it seems to not take advantage of WP having category-xx.php templates.
OR
I could then create a default PAGE for the general portfolio and 5 category pages!!! category-poems.php, category-fiction.php… and so forth
While this seems to still let me have a PAGE-link on the main menu this seems awfully inefficient.
OR
I could code a category-portfolio.php page that can nav through the sub categories of the portfolio w/o actually leaving the main portfolio category. of course then that “page” is a category in the blog and not an actual page page, so it wouldn’t show up in the page menu.
OR
I could forgo a a PAGE menu structure all together, coding each section of the site as a category-xx.php page ( that way each article merely needs to go in a category) and the menu would be a category list, and do as I mentioned in the previous example for sub category navigation. The problem of course is that I would not be able to arrange the links in the main menu (the way you can with page-menu order). Also, it seems i would have to duplicate a category.php document for each page (section) of my site instead of letting them all be based on a single page.php template…
any thoughts oh how to organize the information would be greatly appreciated. Thanks!