The thing about portfolio sites is that they're one of the most important sites you'll create and at the same time, they can get ignored very easily. Until this site revision launched, I hadn't updated my portfolio in years. My excuse was that it was just too much of a pain to update since it was built with all static HTML files. That all changed when I discovered the incredible Symphony content management system.
Symphony is based entirely on XML and XSLT. Before I started on this project, I really didn't know XSLT at all, but now I don't think I could live without it.
What really appeals to me about Symphony is that it breaks down content management to it's simplest form. You have data, then you format that data. That's it. No weird plugins or modding the CMS code to make it do what you want it to do, you just have to focus on the structure of your site. Plus, the code it generates is beautiful. Just view the source of this page and have a look!
I hadn't came across something that has made me this excited about web development in a long time. So many thanks to the Symphony development team. I'm reallly looking forward to their 2.0 release.