Hand built would be good because you could customize it the way you want and wouldn’t have to depend on the CMS’s capabilities. Doesn’t need to be anything fancy. Othe other hand, I tend to use Wordpress because Joomla escapes my brain – I find it complicated. I’ve built [ am building ] a couple of friend’s websites [ for free ] on Wordpress as a CMS and am doing one for a client as well – if you have the hang of PHP to a certain degree, Worpdress might be ideal.
i second the wordpress vote. i like joomla, but it’s probably too big for what you want to do. Wordpress will do plenty and is a little easier to manage. off course, if you are comfortable with Joomla, then you can do some “neat” stuff with it.
what kind of portfolio are we talking about? art, web design?
It would be good to know what kind of portfolio site. If photography, sub out to something like Zenfolio or SmugMug.
If it’s Web design, use what you do best. I don’t like shoehorning Wordpress in to something it’s not. Personally, I just quickly put something together with Django because it’s what I know best. For me it’s easier to build one from scratch in something I know than to learn how to make a Wordpress theme.
It’s a design portfolio for the most part- and I should say I’m re-designing my portfolio, not starting from scratch and that I am an experienced designer, but I just don’t have much of a stomach for programming beyond actionscript, but I do know enough PHP to get by.