hugo-purus: A pure theme for Hugo

purus (the Latin word for 'pure') is the theme powering my personal website. It offers you the no-frills experience for Hugo that you might be craving for.

Caveat emptor

I am new to Hugo and new to writing themes for it. If you think something can be solved more generally or more elegantly, tell me!

Summary

The theme is mean to support a simple (personal | academic) website with an additional blog section. It assumes that the content is laid out in the following form in your content folder:

• _index.md: the main index file
• foo.md: a section called foo
• bar.md: a section called bar
• blog/: a folder containing your blog posts

How to use

Step 1: Clone the repository into your local themes folder for Hugo. If you are already using git to keep track of the changes of your website, you should make this into a submodule. If you are not using git already for this purpose, you really should start doing so. Set theme = "purus" in your config.toml.

Step 2: Start adding menu entries to your configuration file config.toml. Here is an example from my own website:

[[menu.main]]
  name = "About"
  url  = "/about/"

[[menu.main]]
  name = "Blog"
  url = "/blog/"
  weight = -50

[[menu.main]]
  name = "Research"
  url  = "/research/"
  weight = -100

The weight parameter can be used to sort entries.

Step 3: Add footer information into config.toml. This is what will be shown in the footer for every page. Again, here is a simple example:

[params.footer]
  text = """
  This is a simple footer.
  You can use multiple lines and *markdown* commands.
"""

Step 4: Create awesome content! Nothing is pre-configured in this theme except for an automated treatment of blog posts. If you blog, create a file _index.md in a blog directory. This is the preamble or prefix for all your articles; they will just be added as a list to this page. My _index.md just contains a general introduction to my blog and a header # All articles to indicate the beginning of the list of articles. Strictly speaking, this is not required, though.

Extras

I have not (yet) defined too many extra shortcodes anything, but you can use {{< tag_cloud >}} in your content to create a tag cloud of blog articles, for example.