Little Ghost (Hugo Theme)

I am designing a theme called Little Ghost for the static-site generator Hugo. I’m currently in the early stages of its development, but it works and can be installed using the instructions in its Github repository. The purpose of the theme is to give new users who want to use Hugo’s powerful content management features an easy and aesthetically pleasing kick-start to their websites.

I created this theme using my knowledge of HTML5/CSS as well as Go, the programming language on which Hugo is built. I start with Bootstrap, but much of what is happening in the design goes well beyond “out of the box” Bootstrap, including offering users SCSS variables to customize the look and feel of their site, rich front-matter configurations for posts and pages, and nearly automatic search-engine optimization.

There are many developments that are on the way. A few that I’ve begun working on include:

• More detailed documentation for installing and using the theme.
• Support for multiple authors in the design, metadata, and search engine optimization elements of the theme. This will make it well-suited for organization pages as well as personal users. (I anticipated this feature and much of it is already baked into the design; I just need to write some of the front-matter variables and revise a few layout pages.)
• A few other user-customizable features, such as deciding when to include the author card, the ability to use drop-down navigation, etc.

I’ve also started to create a number of Hugo shortcodes, the majority of which are not yet included in the theme. Soon, I’ll begin adding those to theme’s repository, and also plan to create individual Github repositories for folks that might just want the shortcode.