EPFolio – Explorer Portfolio Kit

Description

Want a stunning personal portfolio — academia, experience, research, blog and contact — without heavy page builders, bloated themes, or writing a single line of code? 🤔

Most portfolio solutions ship megabytes of scripts and lock you into their builder. Your visitors wait, your Core Web Vitals suffer, and your content is trapped. 😩

EPFolio – Explorer Portfolio Kit takes the opposite path: a lightweight, super fast kit built on native WordPress blocks — and your whole portfolio is ready in one click. 😎

⚡ SUPER FAST & TRULY LIGHTWEIGHT

No jQuery. No frameworks. No build step. No third-party libraries. Just two small static files (one CSS, one JS) served from your own site — the entire plugin is only ~40 KB zipped. Your portfolio stays fast, and your PageSpeed score stays green.

🚀 READY-MADE PORTFOLIO IN ONE CLICK

Activate the plugin and the kit sets up your Academia, Professional, Research, Volunteering and Blog pages — pre-designed, added to your header menu (Blog last), and ready to edit with your own story. You can also (re)create them any time from Settings → Portfolio. Existing pages are never overwritten.

📊 GOOGLE ANALYTICS (GA4) — AVAILABLE OUT OF THE BOX

Paste your GA4 Measurement ID (G-XXXXXXXXXX) and analytics is live. No API key, no extra plugin, no configuration maze. The snippet loads only when an ID is set, and logged-in administrators are never tracked, so your own visits don’t pollute your stats.

🌟 Top Features

• One-click starter pages — a complete portfolio (Academia, Professional, Research, Volunteering, Blog) generated instantly, wired into your header menu
• Google Analytics (GA4) ready — paste one ID, done; no API key needed, admins excluded
• Lightweight & super fast — two static assets, no jQuery, no build, no external libraries
• Dark / light theme — floating toggle, visitor’s choice remembered, applied before paint (no flash)
• Your palette — three accent colours drive every gradient and highlight via CSS variables
• Animated timelines — a scroll-driven line fills as visitors read, with a glowing “you are here” marker — and playful ladybug markers on selected pages 🐞
• Styled blog grid — featured image, date, title, excerpt and pagination, all left-aligned and clean
• Sticky glass header with a sliding gradient underline on the current page
• Instant site search — a search icon is added to your menu; a compact command-palette overlay (icon, /, or ⌘/Ctrl-K) indexes every page, post and heading, deep-links to the exact section, and refreshes itself on every update
• Spam-guarded contact form — nonce + honeypot + per-IP throttling, delivered with wp_mail()
• WhatsApp chat button — floating bubble with a hover label and optional pre-filled first message; on/off dropdown in settings
• SEO built in — meta description, canonical, Open Graph, Twitter Cards and JSON-LD (Person / BlogPosting) from your name and links
• WebP image optimization — uploads become lean WebP sub-sizes automatically
• Security headers — conservative no-config headers, optional WordPress-version hiding and XML-RPC off
• Smooth page transitions — cross-fade between pages (View Transitions API, progressive)
• Back-to-top button, scroll-reveal animations and a reading-progress bar
• Editor preview — patterns look the same in the block editor as on the site
• Mobile responsive — including an on-brand dark mobile menu
• 9 block patterns under “EPFolio – Explorer Portfolio Kit” in the inserter — build by hand any time
• Every feature optional — switch anything off from one settings screen; nothing is hardcoded

🌗 DARK & LIGHT, YOUR COLOURS

Dark by default, light on tap — the visitor’s choice is remembered and applied before the first paint, so there is never a flash. Pick three accent colours once and the hero gradient, buttons, timeline, links and underlines all follow.

📈 TIMELINES THAT TELL YOUR STORY

Education, roles, publications and volunteering render as vertical timelines: the rail fills as visitors scroll and the entry being read glows. On selected pages the markers become gently fluttering ladybugs — a small moment of delight that makes your portfolio memorable. 🐞

🔎 INSTANT SEARCH, EVERYWHERE

A search icon appears in your header automatically. One keystroke (/ or ⌘/Ctrl-K) opens a compact overlay that searches every published page and post — including individual headings — and jumps straight to the matching section. The index rebuilds itself whenever content or the plugin is updated.

✉️ CONTACT FORM + 💬 WHATSAPP

A spam-guarded contact form (nonce, honeypot, per-IP throttling) emails submissions to any address you choose — and a floating WhatsApp button opens a chat with you in one tap, optionally pre-filling the visitor’s first message. Both optional, both configured in one place.

🔍 SEO & SOCIAL SHARING BUILT IN

Meta description, canonical URL, Open Graph and Twitter Card tags, plus JSON-LD structured data (Person on the front page, BlogPosting on posts) — generated from the name and links you set. No separate SEO plugin required for a personal site.

🛡️ LEAN, HARDENED, PRIVATE

Conservative security headers, optional WordPress-version hiding and XML-RPC switch-off. The plugin itself makes zero external requests — the only exception is Google’s gtag.js, and only if you enable Analytics.

👨‍💻 DOCUMENTATION AND SUPPORT

• Questions? Visit the plugin’s Support Forum

💙 LOVED EPFOLIO?

• Rate it on WordPress.org — it helps more than you think 🙌

External services

This plugin can connect to two external services. Both are optional and inactive until you configure them in Settings → Portfolio.

Google Analytics (Google LLC)
Used to collect visitor statistics for your own site. If — and only if — you enter a GA4 Measurement ID, the plugin loads Google’s gtag.js script from https://www.googletagmanager.com/ on front-end pages, and standard analytics data (the page URL, referrer, and the visitor’s IP address, browser and device information) is sent to Google on every front-end page view under your own Google Analytics account. Logged-in administrators are excluded, and nothing is loaded or sent while no Measurement ID is set.
Google Analytics Terms of Service · Google Privacy Policy

WhatsApp (WhatsApp LLC)
Used by the optional floating “Chat on WhatsApp” button. The button is a plain link to https://wa.me/ with the phone number (and optional pre-filled first message) you configure — the plugin loads no WhatsApp script and sends no data. The visitor’s browser contacts WhatsApp only if the visitor clicks the button, which opens a WhatsApp chat with you.
WhatsApp Terms of Service · WhatsApp Privacy Policy

Privacy

The plugin itself makes no external requests. If — and only if — you enter a Google Analytics Measurement ID, the Google gtag.js script (https://www.googletagmanager.com/gtag/js) is loaded on the front end and analytics data is sent to Google under your GA account; logged-in administrators are excluded. If you enable this, disclose it in your site’s privacy policy per your local regulations. See “External services” above for full details.

Technical details