Lots of info here: https://news.layervault.com/stories/12434-ask-dn-what-cms-are-you-using-for-your-portfolio

Check out http://www.siteleaf.com/ by the guys at Oak Studio

I'm in the camp of believing a CMS isn't really necessary for a small-to-mid-size portfolio, and could actually be a great opportunity to teach yourself some code or experiment a little bit.

However, I've also heard great things about Craft CMS, Koken, Anchor CMS, Secretary, and Kirby— all of which range from minimal to substantial backends. The usual suspects are Wordpress and Drupal (overkill, in my opinion, but the range of plugins and templates for these CMS's are their killer feature), and I've seen some people using Tumblr as well. If you have the access and ability to install multiple CMS's on your site/server, I'd definitely recommend spinning a couple up and seeing what works for you!

I've used Expression Engine in the past but the community has died down quite a bit. Still a large library of great plugins and nowadays you can setup a good git deployment workflow that makes it a bit cleaner.

Simple and seems nice. Cockpit

Have used only for a couple test, no production sites. Can't testify on its stability.

For small sites I like a lot Stacey (check its GitHub Page for latest version), that is similar than Kirby but free. Another interesting thing (that I don't know whether to call it CMS) will be Selector*, but for the moment is still under development.

Just finished redoing my own site with Statamic, and I love it. The control panel UI is great, super simple, really straightforward, but the strength of the system lies within the file structure, and you make it do just about anything you'd want - for instance, controlling what fields you want to be available for a certain page or post type. On one type of post or page I could have the fields title, date, categories, featured image, content area 1, content area 2, etc., and on another page or post I can set an entirely different set. It's great!

It's still quite young, so there are some small features that might be missing, but even still I find it picks up where other CMSs that I've used fall short, and new updates are rolled out all the time. TRY IT.

This looks promising but not quite ready yet http://keystonejs.com/ built on node.js and express.

Second Perch. It's great if you're used to building straight HTML/CSS and not too hot on php yet. They can step you through turning a site into a series of templates quite easily.

Ghost (http://ghost.org) is a good option if you're looking for something more on the blog side, but does require a little bit of node.js knowledge.

I wouldn't write off Wordpress if you're looking for something more powerful. My current Wordpress setup is Wordpress + Blank Slate Theme: a stripped back theme that gives you the bare bones of what you need, devoid of styling, to built upon + Advanced Custom Fields: A plugin that allows you to create custom fields easily for pages and posts. Basically turns Wordpress into a proper CMS + Contact Form 7: Takes care of any forms you need quite easily.

Jekyll is definitely my favorite - http://jekyllrb.com/

Hey Kyle! I've been working on a startup called 900dpi. We offer a simple CMS for static websites that can be implemented using only HTML and CSS. With 900dpi you can also add forms, includes, and a blog (coming very soon :) ) We use Dropbox to hold all of the files, so there's not even any server setup needed. I'm also a freelancer (with no back-end knowledge), and I've been using 900dpi for all of my clients. They really like how simple it is to use and that means less work for me :) Good luck!

On top of the ones Weston mentioned also check out Perch.

http://grabaperch.com/