Clients | Media | Sectors | Pieces | Projects
I'll provide a brief description of the purpose and fields of phpPortfolio's tables structures below and how they relate to each other.
These are your client records. All pieces and projects are attached to clients. You should create your clients first.
Client records contain information such as Company Name, Description, Image, Contact Name, Address, Phone #, email and web addresses, etc. Only some of these fields are available for public view in the portfolio. Others, such as sensitive contact information, are only for internal use.
Media records are not only a means of categorizing, searching and sorting portfolio pieces, they also can be used as an overview of the scope or variety of your work. Media records contain Title, Description and Image. You must have at least one media record before you can begin entering portfolio pieces.
There's not much to sector records. It's just another way to categorize and sort pieces and projects. For instance, this could be things like 'Public Sector, Retail, Education, Manufacturing, etc'.
Sector records only have one field, Title. There are no public views for sector records, just admin screens for adding or editing the sectors available, when adding a portfolio piece. You must have at least one sector record before adding any portfolio pieces.
Pieces are the core of your portfolio. Pieces make up the main gallery and are available in a number of random image block functions you can use in other areas of your website.
Piece records capture Title, Sector, Media, Description, Rank, Price, Client, and Link. Rank will effect when and in what order your piece will be displayed in various portfolio views. (This behaviour is controlled in your config.php file.) One (1) ranks higher than ten (10). Rank and Price are not displayed to the public. The optional 'Link' field is if you want to link to something off-site.
You must enter pieces into your portfolio before you can put together projects.
Projects are the final area of your portfolio to work on. You do not have to use projects and some users of phpPortfolio may not need projects at all. Projects are a way to group related pieces for the same client into a larger campaign. For instance, you may have a client for whom you have done a complete marketing campaign. This campaign might be made up of a number of pieces such as a new logo, stationary, website, cd-rom and so on.
Project records include Title, Sector, Description, Rank, Client and Pieces. Ranking behaves in the same manner as it does with pieces.