CKAN is your backend, not your frontend

I maintain PortalJS, an open source framework for building data portals, and the most common situation we see is this: an organization runs CKAN, the data management side works fine, and everyone hates the website. That is not CKAN's fault. CKAN is twenty years of solid dataset management: harvesting, organizations, permissions, a real API. But its frontend is a server-rendered Jinja theme, and customizing it means learning the CKAN extension system, template overrides, and a deployment story th