hugo | Sau-Chin Chen's Website

Getting started with the Academic framework for Hugo

Wed, 20 Apr 2016 00:00:00 +0000

The Academic framework enables you to easily create a beautifully simple personal or academic website using the Hugo static site generator.

Key features:

Easily manage your homepage, blog posts, publications, talks, and projects
Configurable widgets available for Biography, Publications, Projects, News/Blog, Talks, and Contact
Need a different section? Just use the Custom widget!
Write in Markdown for easy formatting and code highlighting, with LaTeX for mathematical expressions
Social/academic network linking, Google Analytics, and Disqus comments
Responsive and mobile friendly
Simple and refreshing one page design
Multilingual and easy to customize

```
* Installation
```
- Getting Started
  - Core parameters
  - Introduce yourself
  - Customize the homepage
  - Add your content
  - Remove unused widgets and pages
  - Themes
  - Customization & updating
- Advanced customization
  - Navigation menu
  - Website icon
  - Analytics
  - Third party and local scripts (JS)
  - Language and translation
  - Permalinks
  - Advanced style customization (CSS)
- Updating
- Feedback & Contributing
- License

Installation

Install Hugo and create a new website by typing the following commands in your Terminal or Command Prompt app:
```
hugo new site my_website
cd my_website
```

Install Academic with git:

git clone https://github.com/gcushen/hugo-academic.git themes/academic

Or alternatively, download Academic and extract it into a themes/academic folder within your Hugo website.

If you are creating a new website, copy the contents of the exampleSite folder to your website root folder, overwriting existing files if necessary. The exampleSite folder contains an example config file and content to help you get started.
```
cp -av themes/academic/exampleSite/* .
```
Start the Hugo server from your website root folder:
```
hugo server
```

Now you can go to localhost:1313 and your new Academic powered website should appear.

Customize your website - refer to the Getting Started section below
Build your site by running the hugo command. Then host it for free using Github Pages. Or alternatively, copy the generated public/ directory (by FTP, Rsync, etc.) to your production web server (such as your university’s hosting service).

Getting Started

Assuming you created a new website with the example content following the installation steps above, this section explores just a few more steps in order to customize it.

Core parameters

The core parameters for the website can be edited in the config.toml configuration file:

Set baseurl to your website URL (we recommend GitHub Pages for free hosting)
Set title to your desired website title such as your name
The example Disqus commenting variable should be cleared (e.g. disqusShortname = "") or set to your own Disqus shortname to enable commenting
Edit your details under [params]; these will be displayed mainly in the homepage about and contact widgets (if used). To disable a contact field, simply clear the value to "".
Place a square cropped portrait photo named portrait.jpg into the static/img/ folder, overwriting any defaults. Note that you can edit the avatar filepath to point to a different image name or clear the value to disable the avatar feature. Alternatively, set gravatar to true to use the Gravatar/Wordpress avatar associated with your email address.
To enable LaTeX math for your site, set math = true
Social/academic networking links are defined as multiples of [[params.social]]. They can be created or deleted as necessary.

Introduce yourself

Edit your biography in the about widget content/home/about.md that you copied across from the themes/academic/exampleSite/ folder. The research interests and qualifications are stored as interests and education variables. The academic qualifications are defined as multiples of [[education.courses]] and can be created or deleted as necessary. It’s possible to completely hide the interests and education lists by deleting their respective variables.

Customize the homepage

Refer to our guide on using widgets to customize your homepage.

Add your content

Refer to our guide on managing content to create your own publications, blog posts, talks, and projects.

Remove unused widgets and pages

How to remove unused widgets and content pages.

Themes

The following color themes are available and can be set by the color_theme option in config.toml:

`default`	`ocean`

`forest`	`coffee` + `playfair` font
—	—

`dark`

The following font styles are available and can be set by the font option in config.toml:

default (modern)
classic (original Academic v1 style)
playfair (serif)

Customization & updating

Continue reading below for advanced customization tips and instructions for keeping the framework up-to-date with any improvements that become available.

Advanced customization

It is possible to carry out many customizations without touching any files in themes/academic, making it easier to update the framework in the future.

The [[menu.main]] entries towards the bottom of config.toml define the navigation links at the top of the website. They can be added or removed as desired.

To create a dropdown sub-menu, add identifier = "something" to the parent item and parent = "something" to the child item.

Website icon

Save your main icon and mobile icon as square PNG images named icon.png and apple-touch-icon.png, respectively. Place them in your root static/img/ folder.

Analytics

To enable Google Analytics, add your tracking code in config.toml similarly to googleAnalytics = "UA-12345678-9".

Third party and local scripts (JS)

To add a third party script, create a file named head_custom.html in a layouts/partials/ folder at the root of your website (not in the themes folder). Any HTML code added to this file will be included within your website’s <head>. Therefore, it’s suitable for adding custom metadata or third party scripts specified with the async attribute.

Whereas for your own local scripts, you can link your local JS assets (relative to your root static/js) from your config.toml using custom_js = ["custom.js"].

Language and translation

The interface text (e.g. buttons) is stored in language files which are collected from Academic’s themes/academic/i18n/ folder, as well as an i18n/ folder at the root of your project.

To edit the interface text, copy themes/academic/i18n/en.yaml to i18n/en.yaml (relative to the root of your website). Open the new file and make any desired changes to the text appearing after translation:. Note that the language files are formatted in YAML syntax.

To translate the interface text to another language, follow the above instructions, but name the new file in the form i18n/X.yaml where X is the appropriate ISO/RFC5646 language identifier for the translation. Then follow the brief instructions in the Language section at the bottom of your config.toml. To change the default language used by Academic, set defaultContentLanguage to the desired language identifier in your configuration file.

To translate the navigation bar, you can edit the default [[menu.main]] instances in config.toml. However, for a multilingual site, you will need to duplicate all of the [[menu.main]] instances and rename the new instances from [[menu.main]] to [[Languages.X.menu.main]], where X is the language identifier (e.g. [[Languages.zh.menu.main]] for Simplified Chinese). Thus, the navigation bar can be displayed in multiple languages.

To translate a content file in your content/ folder into another language, copy the file to filename.X.md where filename is your existing filename and X is the appropriate ISO/RFC5646 language identifier for the translation. Then translate the content in the new file to the specified language.

For further details on Hugo’s internationalization and multilingual features, refer to the associated Hugo documentation.

Permalinks

Permalinks , or permanent links , are URLs to individual pages and posts on your website. They are permanent web addresses which can be used to link to your content. Using Hugo’s permalinks option these can be easily customized. For example, the blog post URL can be changed to the form yourURL/2016/05/01/my-post-slug by adding the following near the top of your config.toml (before [params] settings):

[permalinks]
    post = "/:year/:month/:day/:slug"

Where :slug defaults to the filename of the post, excluding the file extension. However, slug may be overridden on a per post basis if desired, simply by setting slug = "my-short-post-title" in your post preamble.

Example 2: let’s consider changing the URL path of posts from post/ to blog/. First, add the following parameters right above the [params] section of your config.toml:

[permalinks]
    post = "/blog/:slug"

Then add aliases = ["/blog/"] to your post archive page post/_index.md so that it can be accessed from the /blog/ URL.

Advanced style customization (CSS)

For advanced customization of the style, you can link custom CSS assets (relative to your root static/css) from your config.toml using custom_css = ["custom.css"].

For example, let’s override some of Academic’s default styles. First, define custom_css = ["override.css"] in config.toml. Then we can create the file static/css/override.css, relative to your website root (i.e. not in the themes directory). Add your custom CSS to this file.

Updating

Feel free to star the project on Github to help keep track of updates and check out the release notes prior to updating your site.

Before updating the framework, it is recommended to make a backup of your entire website directory, or at least your themes/academic directory.

Before updating for the first time, the remote origin repository should be renamed to upstream :

$ cd themes/academic
$ git remote rename origin upstream

To list available updates:

$ cd themes/academic
$ git fetch upstream
$ git log --pretty=oneline --abbrev-commit --decorate HEAD..upstream/master

Then, update by running:

$ git pull upstream

If you have modified files in themes/academic, git will attempt to auto-merge changes. If conflicts are reported, you will need to manually edit the files with conflicts and add them back (git add <filename>).

If there are any issues after updating, you may wish to compare your site with the latest example site to check if any settings changed in config.toml or the +++ frontmatter of content files.

Feedback & Contributing

Please use the issue tracker to let me know about any bugs or feature requests, or alternatively make a pull request.

For general questions about Hugo, there is a Hugo discussion forum.

License

Released under the MIT license.

Customizing the homepage with widgets

Tue, 19 Apr 2016 00:00:00 +0000

Homepage widgets display as sections on the homepage. They can be enabled/disabled and configured as desired. Academic has the following widgets available to use:

About/biography
Selected publications
Recent publications
Recent news/blog posts
Projects
Selected talks
Recent talks
Contact
Tag cloud
Hero (introduction)
Custom widget (demonstrated with the teaching example)

The example site that you copied to create your site uses all the different types of widget (except talks), so you can generally just delete the widgets you don’t need and customize the parameters of the widgets you wish to keep.

The parameters for each widget vary. They can be found in the preamble/frontmatter (between the pair of +++) for each widget installed in the content/home/ folder.

By default, publications will be displayed in a simple list. If you prefer a more detailed list with abstract and image, you can enable the detailed publication list on the homepage by setting list_format = 2 in content/home/publications.md.

To add a widget manually, copy the relevant widget from themes/academic/exampleSite/content/home/ to your content/home/ folder.

Widget identifiers are set to their respective filenames, so a content/home/about.md widget can be linked from the navigation bar by setting the relevant URL as "#about" in config.toml.

This means that if you want to use multiple instances of a widget, each widget will be assigned a unique ID based on the filename that you set. You can then use that ID for linking, like in the above example.

You can use the custom widget to create your own home page sections.

Simply duplicate (copy/paste) and rename the example teaching file at content/home/teaching.md. Then edit the section title, weight (refer to Ordering sections below), and content as desired.

You may also wish to add a navigation link to the top of the page that points to the new section. This can be achieved by adding something similar to the following lines to your config.toml, where the URL will consist of the first title word in lowercase:

[[menu.main]]
    name = "Research"
    url = "#research"
    weight = 10

If you do not require a particular widget, you can simply delete any associated files from the content/home/ folder.

To remove a navigation link from the top of the page, remove the associated [[menu.main]] entry in config.toml.

Ordering widgets

The order that the homepage widgets are displayed in is defined by the weight parameter in each of the files in the content/home/ directory. The widgets are displayed in ascending order of their weight, so you can simply edit the weight parameters as desired.

Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ)

Sun, 10 Apr 2016 00:00:00 +0000

Common questions and answers will be listed here.

I cloned/downloaded Academic but Hugo produces errors when using it with my existing Hugo site

Academic is a website framework rather than just a theme. Therefore, you must follow the full installation guide found on the Demo/Documentation website or in the Github Readme. If you still have problems, first try running Hugo on the Academic Example Site found in the themes/academic/exampleSite folder and then compare the configuration parameters in the Example Site’s config.toml and content files with the files in your existing site.

Hosting your site with Netlify or Cloudflare and experience strange behavior such as filters not working?

Disable post-processing steps such as minification in your Netlify/Cloudflare admin panel.

Publications and other content are not sorted by newest first

Hugo/TOML require that the value for the date field should be in TOML format, as per frontmatter of the content/publication/ files in the example site. If you want to use a partial date, such as year, you should still complete a full date to make a valid TOML date format.

Issue parsing LaTeX in publication abstract

Let’s consider the following LaTeX which fails to parse correctly:

abstract = "${O(d_{\max})}$"

This is a side effect of Academic and Hugo attempting to parse TOML, Markdown and LaTeX content in the abstract. The solution is to:

escape each LaTeX backslash (\) with an extra backslash, yielding \\
escape each LaTeX underscore (_) with two backslashes, yielding \\_.

Hence, editing the above example, we get:

abstract = "${O(d\\_{\\max})}$"

Cannot achieve line break in multiline equation (LaTeX/Mathjax)

\\ usually achieves a line break in a multiline LaTeX/Mathjax equation, but due to Hugo’s Markdown parser it doesn’t.

Solution: use 6 backslashes for a line break, for example:

$$\begin{eqnarray} 
y &=& 1+1   \\\\\\
&=& 2
\end{eqnarray}$$