StatnMap Hugo theme

StatnMap theme is issued from hugo-icarus-theme by digitalcraftsman, but I thought visual changes were to big to keep it as a fork. This is a responsive and customizable theme for bloggers and freelancers. It’s originally a port of the Icarus theme for Hexo made by Ruipeng Zhang. The theme has been revamped to look like wordpress twenty-fifteen theme.
Noteworthy features of this Hugo theme are the integration of a comment-system powered by Utterances, multilingual support and language switch, syntax highlighting and code folding for source code, how-to-cite card and related articles sections on bottom of articles, contact form and optional widgets for the sidebar.

Requires Hugo version > v0.139.2 You can see a live example here: https://statnmap.com

Table of Contents

• Table of Contents
• Get the theme
• Setup
  • Comments
  • Menu
  • Sidebars
  • Tell me who you are
  • Widgets
  • Date line
• Multilanguage
• Contact form
• Linking thumbnails
• Mathematical equations
• Syntax highlighting
• Code Folding
• Sticky list pages
• Gallery shortcode
• Citation card
• Related articles
• Website SEO
• Nearly finished
• Contributing
• License
• Acknowledgements

Get the theme

I assume you’ve Git installed. Inside the folder of your Hugo site run

$ cd themes
$ git clone https://github.com/statnmap/hugo-statnmap-theme.git

You should see a folder called hugo-statnmap-theme inside the themes directory that we created a few moments ago. For more information read the official setup guide of Hugo.

Setup

Next, navigate to the exampleSite folder at themes/hugo-type-theme/exampleSite/. In order to get your site running, you need to copy config.toml and all the content of all relevant subfolders such as i18n/en.toml into the root folders.

To turn the exampleSite folder in a standalone demo site the themesDir property has been set to ../... This way you can preview this theme by running hugo server inside exampleSite folder.

Due to the customized themesDir path Hugo will fail to find themes if you copied the config.toml into the root directory of a regular Hugo website. Make sure you comment out the themesDir property if you use the theme in production.

The config file

Now, let us take a look into the config.toml. Feel free to play around with the settings.

Comments

The optional comment system is powered by Utterances. Enter the GitHub repository "handle/repo" where comments will be synced.

utteranceGitHubRepo = ""

Tip: you can disable the comment section for a single page in its frontmatter:

+++
disable_comments = true
+++

Menu

You can also define the items menu entries as you like. First, let us link a post that you’ve written. We can do this in the frontmatter of the post’s content file by setting menu to main.

+++
menu = "main"
+++

Furthermore, we can add entries that don’t link to posts. Back in the config.toml you’ll find a section for the menus:

[[params.menu]]
    before = true
    label  = "Home"
    link   = "/"

Define a label and enter the URL to resource you want to link. With before you can decide whether the link should appear before or after all linked posts in the menu. Therefore, Home appears before the linked post.

Sidebars

In order to use the full width of the website you can disable the profile on the left and / or the widgets on the right for a single page in the frontmatter:

+++
disable_profile = true
disable_widgets = true
+++

Tell me who you are

This theme also provides a profile section on the left. Add your social network accounts to the profile section on the left by entering your username under params.social. The links to your account will be created automatically.

Widgets

Beside the profile section you can add widgets on the right sidebar. The following widgets are available:

• recent articles
• category list
• tag list
• tag cloud

You can deactivate them under params.widgets:

[params.widgets]
    recent_articles = false
    categories = true
    tags = true
    tag_cloud = true

Date line

The date line includes: post date, # of words, approximate reading, time tags and categories. However, if you want certain pages to omit the date line, simply put nodateline = true in the front matter for that page.

Disable Previous / next article links

To disable the inclusion of a previous/next article link at the bottom of the page, add noprevnext = true to the front matter. This feature, along with nodateline can be used to create standalone pages that are less “blog-like”

Multilingual

You don’t blog in English and you want to translate the theme into different language? No problem. Take a look in the i18n folder and you’ll find a file en.toml. It contains all strings related to the theme. Copy this file, change the name so that it reflects the translation language (like fr.toml) and modify the strings needed.

A language switcher is also available with multilingual website activated. You can add png images of flags named ‘lang.png’ in ‘static/flags’ folder, for new languages other than English and French.

The config.toml file in exampleSite proposes menus for a second language (French). However, as no posts, itemized or contacts are saved with .fr.md extension in this exampleSite, menu items may redirect to the 404 not found page.

If you only have one language for your website, you can remove every Languages, Languages.en and Languages.fr occurrences. Simple [menu.main] have to be used instead.

Credit: statnmap

Contact form

Since this page will be static, you can use formspree.io as proxy to send the actual email. Each month, visitors can send you up to one thousand emails without incurring extra charges. Begin the setup by following the steps below:

1. Enter your formspree endpoint with email address under ‘emailservice’ in contact/index.md file
2. Fill the other contactxx fields in the frontmatter of the contact page
3. Send a dummy email yourself to confirm your account
4. Click the confirm link in the email from formspree.io
5. You’re done. Happy mailing!

Credit: statnmap

Linking thumbnails

After creating a new post you can define a banner by entering the relative path to the image.

banner = "banners/placeholder.png"

Credit: digitalcraftsman

A thumbnail will be used for the recent_articles list in the sidebar as well as in the normal list of articles. If you want a specific thumbnail instead of the banner croped, you can define it by entering the relative path to the thumbnail.

thumbnail = "banners/thumbnail.png"

This way you can store them either next to the content file or in the static folder.

Credit: statnmap

Mathematical equations

Mathematical equations in form of LaTeX or MathML code can be rendered with the support of MathJax. MathML works out of the box. If you’re using LaTeX you need to wrap your equation with $$.

You can also print formulas inline. In this case wrap the formula only once with $.

If you don’t need equations, you can disable MathJax but putting disable_mathjax = true in your config.toml. This will prevent clients from unnecessarily downloading the MathJax library.

MathJax CDN and versions can be modified in the config.toml file:

MathJaxCDN = "//cdn.bootcss.com"
MathJaxVersion = "2.7.1"

Syntax highlighting

Syntax highlighting for code is allowed with highlight.js. This can be disabled in the config.toml. Version, additional languages, CDN and theme can also be modified.

disable_highlight = false
highlightjsVersion = "9.11.0"
highlightjsCDN = "//cdn.bootcss.com"
highlightjsLang = ["r", "yaml"]
highlightjsTheme = "github"

Credit: yihui statnmap

Code folding

Code folding is enabled by default with disable_codefolding = false in parameters of the config file. It uses somes javascript libraries of bootstrap. Code folding (multilingual) buttons only appear when there is code in the document rendered from Rmd in blogdown. disable_codefolding can also be used in each article config header. Similarly, you can define if code blocks are shown or hidden by default using codefolding_show = "hide" in the config file or in each article config.
The list of <pre> blocks on which to apply code folding is defined in the config file: codeblocks = ["pre.sourceCode", "pre.r", "pre.python"]

Credit: statnmap

Sticky list pages

A special kind of posts list is implemented. This allows to show the first article completely and the other articles as a list with summaries. For that, we use the implemented template list_first_plain_sticky.html in partial. You can use it in two ways:

1. With Taxonomy This is implemented in the exampleSite.

   • Create a new taxonomy like ‘sticky’:

   [Taxonomies]
     tag = "tags"
     category = "categories"
     sticky = "stickies"
   

   • Create a folder layout > taxonomy
   • Create a html file named sticky.html with this code:

   {{ define "main" }}
     {{ if isset .Site.Taxonomies "sticky" }}
       {{ partial "list_first_plain_sticky" . }}
     {{ end }}
   {{ end }}
   

   • Add taxonomy stickies in a post or a page. The newest page or the page with weight = 1 will be shown entirely before the other of the same taxonomy (that will only show a summary). In the exampleSite, pages in sticky_pages have this taxonomy.

2. With special pages

   • Create a folder layout > sticky_pages for instance
   • Create a html file named list.html with this code:

   {{ define "main" }}
       {{ partial "list_first_plain_sticky" . }}
   {{ end }}
   

   • Create a folder content > sticky_pages (This is done in the exampleSite)
   • Add a page. The newest page or the page with weight = 1 will be shown entirely before the other of the same taxonomy (that will only show a summary)

Credit: statnmap

Citation

As for Radix, a citation field can be added to blog posts. Citation is enabled by default with disable_citation = false in parameters of the config file. It can also be enabled or disabled in each blog post with disable_citation in the post YAML / TOML. By default author comes from blog author field in the article header but citation_author overrides this field if another writing is needed. citation_author can be specified globally in config file but also for each blog post.
Code is adapted from: Yihan Wu. (2018-12-21). “Blogdown - shortcode for radix-like Bibtex”. Retrieved from https://www.yihanwu.ca/post/blogdown-shortcode-generation-for-bibtex/.

Credit: statnmap

Gallery shortcode

This shortcode you to easily include a gallery into your pages. Copy the code below into your content file and enter the relative paths to your images.

{{< gallery
    "/banners/placeholder.png"
    "/banners/placeholder.png"
    "/banners/placeholder.png"
>}}

Related articles

You can define parameters for related articles at the bottom of blog posts.

[related]
  # Only include matches with rank >= threshold. This is a normalized rank between 0 and 100.
  threshold = 50
  # To get stable "See also" sections we, by default, exclude newer related pages.
  includeNewer = true
  # Will lower case keywords in both queries and in the indexes.
  toLower = true
[[related.indices]]
name = "keywords"
weight = 150
[[related.indices]]
name  = "author"
toLower = true
weight = 30
[[related.indices]]
name  = "tags"
weight = 100
[[related.indices]]
name  = "date"
weight = 10
pattern = "2006"

See https://gohugo.io/content-management/related/ for more informations.

Credit: statnmap

Website SEO

This theme support SEO elements for your website. It was adapted and integrated thanks to the following guide:
https://keithpblog.org/post/hugo-website-seo/

If you wish to enable SEO on this theme, follow these instructions: 1. To include the following parameters in your config.toml or config.yaml

# .config.toml
...
[services]
  [services.googleAnalytics]
    id = 'G-XXXXXXXXXX'
enableRobotsTXT = true
canonifyURLs = true
# and if you think your md file names or locations might change:
[permalinks]
    post = "/blog/:title/"
...

2. Add your website to Google Search Console:
   • Login to the Google Search Console
   • Add your website as property
   • Add the html page as required by google to verify ownership
   • Submit the sitemap (/sitemap.xml) for indexing
   • Wait
3. Add your website to Bing
   • Login to the Bing Webmaster Console
   • Add your site, details and verify
   • From the 3 option, we recommend adding the xml file to you website

Nearly finished

In order to see your site in action, run Hugo’s built-in local server.

$ hugo server

Now enter localhost:4321 in the address bar of your browser.

Contributing

Have you found a bug or got an idea for a new feature? Feel free to use the issue tracker to let me know. Or make directly a pull request.

License

This theme is released under the MIT license. For more information read the license.

Acknowledgements

Thanks to

• Digitalcraftsman for the original Hugo-icarus-theme
• Ruipeng Zhang for creating this theme
• Steve Francia for creating Hugo and the awesome community around the project