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Portfolio Sites

Because Lektor lets you customize your data model entirely it's the perfect tool for building portfolio websites. No matter what it is you're building, you can structure the data exactly like you want. In this example we will assume we build a website for someone who wants to showcase their art projects.

The Models

The way we want to go about this is that we have a site where all the projects show up and then a detail page for each project in particular.

projects.ini

First we set up the project overview page. This model instructs Lektor that all of the pages below it will be of type project. We also set it to hidden and protected which will make it unavailable in the admin (hidden) for new pages and make it impossible to delete (protected). This means we need to manually create the one page later which will use this.

Because we only have a single page for the projects overview we give it a static label manually (label = Projects).

[model]
name = Projects
label = Projects
hidden = yes
protected = yes

[children]
model = project
order_by = -date, name

project.ini

Next up is the model for the project. This is completely up to you, we will go with some things here that might appear on such a portfolio page. In addition we will do something with the attachments of this page, but more about that later. For now we just order them by their filename (_id):

[model]
name = Project
label = {{ this.name }}
hidden = yes

[attachments]
order_by = _id

[fields.name]
label = Name
type = string
size = large

[fields.date]
label = Date
type = date
width = 1/4

[fields.type]
label = Project type
type = string
width = 1/4

[fields.website]
label = Website
type = url
width = 1/2

[fields.description]
label = Description
type = markdown

Templates

So now that we have models, we should probably go over what we can do with the attachments. Because each page in Lektor can have attachments added we can automatically reference those in our templates. Here is what we're going to do: we will take all the attached images, order them by their filename and then render thumbnails for them in the detail page. Additionally we want to show one of the images on the overview page if it's available.

projects.html

So here we just render out all projects in the order defined in our models and if there is an image attached, we pick the first one and make a thumbnail.

{% extends "layout.html" %}
{% block title %}Projects{% endblock %}
{% block body %}
  <h1>Projects</h1>
  <div class="projects">
  {% for project in this.children %}
    <div class="project">
      {% set image = project.attachments.images.first() %}
      {% if image %}
        <img src="{{ image.thumbnail(320)|url }}" alt="">
      {% endif %}
      <h2><a href="{{ project|url }}">{{ project.name }}</a>
        <em>({{ project.date.year }})</em></h2>
      <p><strong>{{ project.type }}</strong></p>
    </div>
  {% endfor %}
  </div>
{% endblock %}

project.html

For the detail page we show all information we know about:

{% extends "layout.html" %}
{% block title %}{{ this.name }} ({{ this.date.year }}){% endblock %}
{% block body %}
  <h1>{{ this.name }}</h1>
  <dl>
    <dt>Date
    <dd>{{ this.date|dateformat }}
    {% if this.website %}
    <dt>Website
    <dd><a href="{{ this.website }}">{{ this.website.host }}</a>
    {% endif %}
    <dt>Project type
    <dd>{{ this.type }}
  </dl>
  <h2>Description</h2>
  <div class="description">{{ this.description }}</div>
  {% set images = this.attachments.images.all() %}
  {% if images %}
    <h2>Images</h2>
    {% for image in images %}
      <div class="image">
        <img src="{{ image.thumbnail(640)|url }}" alt="">
        {% if image.exif %}
        <p class=meta>
          {{ image.exif.camera }}
          {% if image.exif.created_at %}
            ({{ image.exif.created_at|dateformat }})
          {% endif %}
        {% endif %}
      </div>
    {% endfor %}
  {% endif %}
{% endblock %}

Some notes on what's maybe not entirely obvious:

  • a url field does not just give access to the stored URL but also provides some properties such as .host to just get the host of the website.
  • we can use the |dateformat filter to format out dates nicely
  • by calling .all() on our images we get the images back as a list where we can then check if any images exist with if images.
  • we can access embedded EXIF information by using the .exif property.

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