Hugo

2020-07-30 — 2 mins reading time

Launching a new site raises a few questions on the technical side - what kind of tooling do you use? Wordpress? Joomla? Plain HTML? A CMS might be overkill and bears security risks. Plain HTML is too cumbersome when it comes to menus and common layout components.

I found that Hugo is exactly the middle-way I was looking for. You edit your content in simple markdown files and Hugo generates static HTML pages out of them. As with many template engines, there are loads of themes already available.

But why not create my own theme for flexibility? A good tutorial is provided by Thomas Leister in German on his web site. While still valid, there is a small thing, though, that should be done differently - probably because Hugo introduced some new concepts since this article was written. Thus, if you are getting started with Hugo themes, you should definitely check out its official documentation.

The difference lies in the header and footer partials: Instead of putting the whole HTML boiler plate structure into the header/footer partials, make use of layouts/_default/baseof.html. The header and footer partials may then contain only the parts relevant to your web site such as the top bar with the global menu and the bottom bar with your copyright information.