The jekcms Personal theme is an author-led personal blog theme. You can build a simple portfolio with it by putting your projects in a category and telling your story on the about page.
Why a CMS for a Portfolio
Static site generators are often recommended for developer portfolios. That is fine if you rarely update the site. But when you want to add a new project, you have to deal with build and deploy steps. In jekcms you log in to the panel, open a new post, upload the screenshots and publish.
The Personal theme was designed as an author-led personal blog theme for essays, journals and personal notes. It also works for presenting your projects and yourself, and this post shows how we set that up.
First Settings
After activating the theme, enter the site name, tagline, logo and social links on the Settings screen. The theme shows them in the header, footer and on the contact page automatically. You can change the colours and fonts in the theme customiser; the default fonts are Manrope and Lora.
A Category for Projects
You do not need a separate content type for projects. Create a category called "Projects" and publish each project as a post in it: the title is the project name, the featured image is a screenshot, and the content explains what you did and which tools you used. The category page lists the projects as an archive using the theme's cards. Add the category to the menu and visitors reach your projects in one click.
Homepage Layout
The Personal homepage is built from sections that you arrange in the layout editor. At the top there is a hero slider that rotates through a few posts; you can switch it to a static single post if you prefer. Below it come an intro grid with one large and three small cards, latest posts, popular posts and a newsletter band. For a portfolio, putting your three best projects in the hero and your recent work in the grid works well. Any section you do not need can be turned off in the layout editor.
About and Contact
The theme has its own about template and contact template. Describe your experience, the areas you work in and the tools you use on the about page in plain text. Short, concrete points tell readers more than percentage skill bars. The contact page comes with a form.
Dark Mode
The theme opens in light or dark mode based on the visitor's system preference. Visitors can switch with a button in the header, and their choice is stored in the browser. The mode is set before the page is drawn, so there is no flash of the wrong colours on load.
Speed
Project images are converted to AVIF and WebP on upload, off-screen images load as you scroll, and pages are rendered on the server. With no JavaScript framework involved, portfolio pages stay light.
