Spaced Blog Theme

A beautifully minimalistic Hugo theme for blogs. With dark mode, page search and a11y out of the box.

Main features:

• Dark mode support
• a11y support
• Page search
• Mobile responsive
• Blog author accreditation
• Configurable colors
• Configurable cover images

Installation

Create a new Hugo site:

$ hugo new site [path]

Clone this repository into themes/ directory:

$ cd [path]
$ git clone https://github.com/Morgscode/hugo-theme-spaced-blog.git themes/spaced-blog

Or if you’re version controlling your website - you can add it as a submodule

$ cd [path]
$ git submodule add https://github.com/Morgscode/hugo-theme-spaced-blog.git themes/spaced-blog

Add this line in the config.toml file:

theme = "spaced-blog"

Configuration

Site params

In your config.toml file, define the following variables in params:

• description = This will be the default html meta description for the blog and it’s homepage. It can be overridden by setting a description in the front-matter of any page or post.
• useCover: wether or not you want to use a cover images for the blog and its posts
• coverLocation: The location of the cover file you’d like to use for the blog
• [[params.author]]
• [[params.author]]name: The name of the primary blog author
• [[params.author]]description: The primary blog author’s description

To set the blog author’s avatar image - place an image named blog-author.jpg in your sites /content/images folder.

To add a menu item, add the following lines in menu:

[[menu.menu_name]]
  identifier = "item-identifier"
  name = "Item Name"
  url = "/item-slug"

The basic menu structure you’ll need for this theme is:

[menu]
  [[menu.main]]
    identifier = "home"
    name = "Home"
    url = "/"
    weight = 1
  [[menu.main]]
    identifier = "categories"
    name = "Categories"
    url = "/categories"
    weight = 2
  [[menu.main]]
    identifier = "tags"
    name = "Tags"
    url = "/tags"
    weight = 3

Read the Hugo documentation for more informations about menus.

Site colors

You can customise the theme colors from your sites config.

[params.colors]
  black = "#222222"
  white = "#fafafa"
  grey = "#dcdde1"
  red = "#e84118"
  blue = "#00a8ff"
  green = "#4cd137"
  yellow = "#fbc531"
  purple = "#9c88ff"

Site icon (favicon)

The theme ships with a default site icon (favicon) that is used in the tab in your browser but also the shortcut icon on mobile devices. To use your own favicon, just add it to your sites assets directory /assets/images/favicon.(png|ico).

Favicons are best kept with an aspect ratio of 1:1.

Cover images

To use cover images for the blog: set the useCover param to true.

[params]
  useCover = true

To add a default cover image for your entire blog, name your image blog-cover.(jpg|png) and place in assets/images.

The cover-image.html template uses a cover image hierarchy which goes as:

1. cover.(png|jpg) in page bundle.
2. The coverLocation page param.
3. The coverLocation site param.
4. A .jpg image in the assets/images directory.
5. a .png image in the assets/images directory.

The templates use the coverLocation params with the resources.GetMatch Hugo template funcions which looks in the site’s /assets directory first and then the theme’s /assets directory.

syntax highlighting

This theme ships with a slightly altered monakai syntax highlighting stylesheet and more or less the default markup highlight configuration. To use it set the noClasses param to false in the markup highlight config.

[markup]
  [markup.highlight]
    noClasses = false

The theme’s base layout pulls in a css stylesheet which is a tiny variation on the monokai theme to handle the highlighting styles: /assets/css/syntax.css

Sidebar

The theme ships with a sidebar comes with a search form which has %like% behaviour for all of your page names.

To active the sidebar set the usesidebar site param to true in your config.toml

[params]
  useSidebar = true

Google analytics, opengraph and twitter cards

This theme ships with standard support for Hugo’s Internal templates.

Load these into your site config like you would any other Hugo site.

Read about Internal templates in Hugo

License

This theme is released under the MIT License.

TODOS:

• Add author social media icon support
• Add about the author block for single post
• Add support for Github-like copy to clipboard for block-level code elements
• Add support for single post author override
• Add support for multiple authors per post
• Add support for lazyloading images

See Also

• Blowfish
• Compost
• Hugoplate
• Lightbi
• Paige