roadmap: possible upcoming major changes

[McShelby]

This is a list of ideas running thru my head to make the theme more compliant with standard Hugo features. This does not necessarily mean, that these changes finally will happen:

• theme: reorganize repo to reduce size #718 this will most likely outsource the docs to a different repo
• resources: new shortcode to deprecate attachments shortcode #22 deprecate attachments shortcode in favor for resources shortcode
• menu: support for external links #148 switch the main menu generation to standard Hugo menu feature for more flexibility of what to include in the links
• theme: reduce build time #685 deprecate hidden pages feature? would make menu generation much faster
• theme: end support for Internet Explorer 11 #584
• put all theme config option under [params.relearn] for hugo.toml and probably frontmatter - Hugo is thinking into a similar direction of getting more structure into the params (there it's motivated by having clean interfaces for the underlying object structures and not hassle around with volatile object properties)
• remove internal output-partial mechanism by reverting back to standard partial calls
• simpify the archetype support by not clattering it in multiple files
• revisit layouts support, maybe add more (landing page without menu, gallery, etc?)
• leverage baseof templates?
• leverage Hugo's _cascade feature to inherit settings in hierachical structures; this will affect the menu options hidden, alwaysopen, ordersectionby and collapsibleMenu

[cagix]

• deprecate hidden pages feature? would make menu generation much faster theme: reduce build time #685

while i understand hidden pages could make menu generation more complex, removing hidden pages seems to be a major step backwards in my use case and would potentially force me to switch to another theme.

[McShelby]

I am also not happy with this. This would also affect the use case at my company, so I doubt that I will implement it in that radical way. One other thought is to make it opt-in and explicitly mention the performance impact. I need to do further tests to decide on this.

[cagix]

I am also not happy with this. This would also affect the use case at my company, so I doubt that I will implement it in that radical way. One other thought is to make it opt-in and explicitly mention the performance impact. I need to do further tests to decide on this.

i'm kinda intrigued with the way folks over at mdbook are handling this: they use a separate file named "summary.md" to construct the menu. such a file could be easily provided manually or even constructed automatically in case one needs hidden pages. but that's not really the path of hugo ...

[McShelby]

Sounds intersting. Do you have a link to the docs? My quick google-fu was not successful.

[cagix]

Sounds intersting. Do you have a link to the docs? My quick google-fu was not successful.

https://rust-lang.github.io/mdBook/guide/creating.html, https://github.com/rust-lang/mdBook

hmmm, the "summary.md" seems also to be used as kind of toc and/or start page. but the structure and the linked documents is used to create the menu.

[McShelby]

Thanks @cagix. To me this sounds like a page is hidden if it is not contained in any summary. Probably the page is still accessible by direct linking. But this would mean the page is also not part of the book hierarchy which would be different from the themes hidden page feature. Or do i miss a part?

[cagix]

Thanks @cagix. To me this sounds like a page is hidden if it is not contained in any summary. Probably the page is still accessible by direct linking. But this would mean the page is also not part of the book hierarchy which would be different from the themes hidden page feature. Or do i miss a part?

indeed, it seems to work this way. but perhaps the idea could be adapted: hugo usually renders all pages contained in a certain folder and uses the structure and names or weights to populate the menu. now, to implement hidden pages, we could derive the menu in this case from something like a "summary.md", so only items defined in this file will show up in the menu - but hugo will render all pages as usual, which will "hide" all pages, which are not being referenced in the summary ...