Reply To: make permalink go to a custom single.php file in WordPress

[Alen]

I’m not exactly sure what you’re trying to do but shouldn’t you be creating pages and not blog posts. single.php is responsible for displaying specific blog post, if you are adding portfolio page you should be using WordPress admin to create the page, then create the associated template file. So if you named your page portfolio, template responsible for displaying this information would be page-portfolio.php where portfolio is the slug for that page.

See this also: http://codex.wordpress.org/Template_Hierarchy

Hope that helps,
-Alen