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Recommendations for a CMS for self-hosted portfolio site?

1 points by chimerical ↗ HN
My friend and I recently built a shared projects site that is structurally very similar to a designer portfolio site. It used to be a static site built manually page by page using HTML/CSS/JS with no template system.

We recently switched to a self-hosted WordPress installation to allow for some kind of templating and to allow page and content creation via a basic management system. But we seem very restricted by what WordPress and the chosen theme allows.

Are there any recommendations for a CMS that fit the following needs?

- Free and self-hosted

- Very basic template to manually managing and creating pages (doesn't have to be as overkill as WordPress)

- A basic interface for creating a page of content, and to add to a main page with a gallery of items leading into those individual pages

Thanks!

7 comments

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nerdburn
I just saw that Dribbble will host your portfolio on a custom domain for $18 a year now. I almost considered it except that I also blog on my domain.
viraptor
Did you think about just templating your static stuff? You're not going to get new portfolio entries every day and you likely don't need writing staff accounts, comments, or anything similar that CMSes are about.

If you either template what you have now, or go with something from https://www.staticgen.com/ you get a few benefits:

- no upgrades necessary, no security patches, no incompatibilities

- you can host yourself trivially

- you can host literally anywhere, including just sticking the files on s3

chimerical
Yeah, this looks like a promising solution! I assume this means content creation occurs in the source code instead (not a showstopper, but a nice-to-have request from my friend)?
jardaroh
May I recommend using Django CMS? In my opinion it is the best basic CMS, truly user friendly, free and open and builds upon Django web framework.

Templating is very simple, if you have looked at twig for php it should look very familiar.

Also, with the power of python and Django, your imagination really is the only limit to how you expand upon the site.

Best of luck!

chimerical
I've definitely heard of it! Would I need to know Python well to use it? (Not opposed to getting better at Python, obviously, but just a consideration for my partner)
DanieleProcida
You only need to learn Python if you want to do back-end development. Templating, design, content etc don't require any Python skills - just as you don't need PHP skill to build sites in WordPress.