Portfolio Lea is a journalist/writer portfolio template built with Next.js and Netlify CMS that generates a fully static personal website with dark mode and incremental static regeneration for remote Medium articles.
What is Portfolio Lea?
Portfolio Lea is a journalist/writer portfolio website template built on Next.js and integrated with Netlify CMS. It consumes content written in Markdown and JSON, outputs a fully static HTML site by default, and runs on Netlify. The template is set up for the personal portfolio of Léa Shamaa and includes a live site at leashamaa.nl.
Key Features
- Fully statically generated — the Next.js build process pre-renders every page as static HTML, which improves load speed and SEO.
- Dark mode — the site ships with dark mode as a built-in theme option.
- Git-based CMS (Netlify CMS) — editors can manage content through an admin UI that writes Markdown/JSON and commits changes to the repository.
- Preview mode — Netlify CMS provides a preview pane for reviewing unpublished changes before publishing.
- Incremental Static Regeneration (ISR) for Medium articles — the site fetches remote Medium posts on-demand and updates those pages without a full rebuild.
- Markdown and JSON based — all page content, from bio to articles, is stored as files, making it easy to version and transfer.
- Local backend proxy — when
local_backendis set totrueinpublic/admin/config.yml,yarn run devalso starts a Netlify CMS proxy for local content editing. - Bundle analysis —
yarn run analyzegenerates a production bundle report to help optimize JavaScript size.
Who is it for?
- Journalists — present a portfolio of published articles, with each piece stored as Markdown/JSON and displayed on its own page.
- Writers who post on Medium — automatically pull in their Medium articles via ISR to keep the portfolio current.
- Freelancers and developers — get a pre-configured Next.js + Netlify CMS project with static generation, dark mode, and deploy readiness.
What can you do with Portfolio Lea?
- Journalists: add a new article by creating a Markdown file or using the Netlify CMS editor, and it appears on the site after commit.
- Medium authors: connect the portfolio to a medium feed so recent posts are regenerated incrementally without rebuilding the entire site.
- Design-conscious freelancers: present work in a clean, dark-mode static site that loads fast and is easy to update via the CMS admin.
How does Portfolio Lea work?
The template uses Next.js for routing and static generation. After cloning, run yarn install and then yarn run dev — the dev server starts along with a Netlify CMS local proxy if configured. Content lives in the repository as Markdown and JSON; edits made through the CMS are committed to Git and rebuilt on Netlify. For production, yarn run build generates the static output, and yarn run analyze produces a bundle analysis.
