Best way to navigate a hierarchy of portfolio items? Portfolio permalinks?

(I posted this during the weekend but I think I posted it to the general support forum, instead of this Virtue-specific support area—so it didn’t add the metadata for the Virtue theme and wasn’t brought to Kadence Themes’s attention. Hope this is OK.)

Hello Kadence Themes and anyone who may also have ideas:

I’ve searched around on the WordPress admin panel (theme options, portfolio, etc.), on these fora and through Google, but I haven’t found answers to these questions about organising portfolio items/pages.

We’re using the latest version of Virtue free (paid is an option if we find several useful features). We are using the portfolio feature to showcase several categories of things we do as a group, and use a portfolio-types hierarchy. As a brief example:

• events

• workshops
• competitions

• projects

• robotics
• audio

We want to allow users to navigate this hierarchy of portfolio items. Right now, we have pages with slugs /events, /events/workshops, etc., that are Portfolio Grid types and also have navigation forward/backward in this hierarchy, but this is all done by hand.

The portfolio pages themselves, for each of the events/projects, do not have a link back to these portfolio types or these pages, only a link back to the “All Projects Portfolio Page” I can set in the theme options.

I am wondering your thoughts on the following:

1. Is there any better strategy for allowing users to navigate a hierarchy of portfolio items than my Portfolio Grid page-based approach?
2. Is there any way to allow users to navigate from a specific Portfolio page back to the portfolio listing (other than manually including a link)? (For example, automatically linking back to the portfolio-types page, or to the Portfolio Grid page I created for that portfolio-type?
3. Would it be possible for the permalink to be of the structure /portfolio/projects/robotics/my-robot-project instead of just /portfolio/my-robot-project? (i.e. show the portfolio-types hierarchy in the permalink)

As mentioned, although we are using Virtue free, Virtue premium is a possibility—if any of this is possible only in Premium, we’ll gladly add that to our list of pros for buying it!

I am also trying to avoid significant amounts of custom development (plugins/significant work in a child theme), due to the maintenance effort that it creates to ensure it continues to work with Virtue and WordPress upgrades.

Thanks!

Best regards,

Laogeodritt