Clay,
If you use Moodle you will want to explore the Mahara integration. The new plugin released in February for the Mahara Assignment Type is amazing. Really nice work.
In the high school we have a teacher who used to make the portfolio part of his class as an assignment first thing in the semester. Now he restructured the class so that the students spend most of the semester adding content to Mahara and it isn't until the end of the semester he shows them how to display their content into a page.
He has gotten better results with this approach. Starting with a finished portfolio in mind didn't work well as the students were trying to tackle too much too fast to just complete the portfolio. With the new approach each step is sequential. Journaling is started in the beginning and ongoing. Then you add in a few writings and other projects. Introduce the built in resume builder to add some personal accomplishments and goals. Students keep feeding content into Mahara. Each new step is a new skill they learn and it isn't overwhelming taking everything on all at once. Then at the end you show them the page builder and show how to drop in their content that they have been adding all semester.
The integration between Moodle and Mahara is impressive!