Best part of it all, we did it at no additional cost. We already pay for hosting and Amazon S3 and leverage that for proofs!

Bare in mind that this was one of the first times I learned how to add a custom post type to WordPress. I made this nearly 2 or more years ago and it should really be a plugin on it’s own, as it would then be independent of any theme you are using on your site. Also know that this isn’t an all in one solution, there are a few other things required to make the solution complete, so let me explain!

When we started our business we were editing in Aperture and using their .me galleries to proof photos, shortly after this though Apple ended that feature of their .me service with their move to everything iCloud. So we were looking for a new solution and I said, “I think we can do this on our own site.” Luckily we had built our site on WordPress, affording us a lot of flexibility for this.

WordPress has this great feature where you can add what is called Custom Post Types. This offers you different ways to organize and create content for your site. For example WordPress comes with two obvious post types out of the box. Posts and Pages are their own post type, and you may often see post types like Slides or Testimonials, etc…

With that in mind I wanted to create a Custom Post Type for our proofs. Luckily a lot of the functionality we needed for proofs already existed in other plugins, all we needed was the post type to help organize and protect the posts. Here’s what we use to this day to do proofing on our site!

• Proofs Custom Post Type
• Custom Taxonomies on Proofs
• WordPress Galleries Functionality
• Jetpack Carousel Module

The Proofs Post Type

This is the only technical part of doing all of this, but I’m sharing how we did this to make it easy for you. As I said above, this really needs to be in a plugin as a complete solution but it is working for us at the moment. You’ll want to add the following code to your theme’s functions.php file. This essentially registers the post type and adds the taxonomy to the post type.

Once you’ve done that you’ll see the proofs custom post type show up on the WordPress dashboard. Oh, you may want to create your own proof image for this. Mine’s pretty ugly!

Galleries & Carousels

Just click add new to get started creating a proof. From here it looks just like writing any post in WordPress. Title your post and upload your images to the post. Here I’d recommend simply creating a gallery and put it in your post. There are plenty of tutorials if you need help creating a gallery in WordPress. It’s much quicker and more efficient than embedding one image at a time we think. Plus that’s the only way the Carousel plugin works is with galleries.

You can then make the proof post password protected, and pick a shoot type to further organize your proof. Click publish and your proof is published and private for your client!

Viewing the proof is easy. We simply send our clients the url and password to their proofs, it looks like so once you’ve visited the url and put the password in.

We also send instructions on how to operate the Carousel. It’s really quite easy, click on any image on the gallery and it opens in this lightbox. You can then click or use your keyboard arrows to navigate through it. For the clients to give us feedback, they can leave comments on each photo or just email us referencing the photo number.

And that is essentially it for our proofing process, super easy thanks to a lot of already existing features and plugins for WordPress. This can work the same for video if you wanted to embed a private video in a proof and so on. Also, please anyone feel free to fork that Gist and make it better! Thanks!

I’ve wrote a little bit more about it over at WooThemes, but here is more of my personal take on the weekend. I’d convinced Mindy to come try out a WordCamp as publishing has been a fairly significant part of our lives for awhile, even though it’s slipped as of late. We of course use WordPress to do so, but nonetheless I thought we’d hear some great sessions on creating content. I was definitely right, as we sat in on some really inspiring sessions about writing and publishing.

Both of the points that made the biggest impact for me came from sessions by members of the 8bit crew. The first coming from John Saddington. To sum it up, ideas strike when we’re not ready. We put off creating action or doing these ideas when we should be doing. Act on intuition was something I took away from this. I see it applicable to all areas of my life, but especially where I dream of things I’d like to do with my life. I don’t want to only dream about them, I want to do them.

The second came from Chris Ames. His session really helped bring home the point of why anyone should write. It could be for numbers of reasons, but if you can “wrestle your writing muse to the dusty earth” then inspiration will be found. I’ve already got a blog idea board capturing ideas for posts. For me I want to write more as there are things I want to remember. This blog is my digital way of keeping a journal, and we can’t be afraid of the publish button if we’ve got something to say.

This was my first WordCamp and both Mindy and I enjoyed it. If you are into writing, self publishing, design, or development using WordPress I give WordCamps two thumbs up! Here are a few shots from the weekend.

I hate calling it a date night, but we definitely focus on getting out of our home office and enjoying the city. In particular, this time of year is my favorite of all. We had a delicious dinner on the porch at 3 Sister’s Cafe, and followed that up with Pumkpin bread and lattes from The Monon Coffee House. Finally ending the night watching a movie with Pumkpin ice cream. Bring on the next weekend, where we will actually be travelling again…

One of the features being the ability to drop your FPS, I believe I was down to 2 FPS for this this morning. Can’t wait to share the final video that the time lapse will be used in!

Well, we’ve decided to change that now. We picked up a new MacBook Air just yesterday as the first step in that process. This will eventually be Mindy’s machine, but I’m stealing it at the moment since she gets to plug in our current MacBook Pro into my 27 inch iMac as a monitor. We’ll be selling off the iMacs here shortly, starting with Mindy’s 21.5 inch. Then followed by the big 27 inch guy. We’ll be down to our tiny but ultra portable laptops then. We’re simply waiting for Apple to update the Thunderbolt displays with USB3 and we’ll take the plunge on those. We still love having a huge screen to edit videos and photos on, so that will serve as our docking station when home.

I think since Mindy will have the ultra portable, I’m going to grab a 15 inch MacBook Pro and sell the 13 inch at some point. It’s a bit confusing keeping all the data straight, but I’m excited to get down to two portable computers and be able to lug them most anywhere. It’s been awesome using the MacBook Air as my work machine currently. Specifically while doing my WooThemes work, it’s lightning fast and a breeze to use.