I’d like to provide a quick and dirty day one review of Hugo with the Blowfish theme. I’m still not sure if I’m going to stick with this one, but it looks like it should serve my needs for quite a while.
Ease of Use #
No, I don’t think the Blowfish theme is for the faint of heart. First, with the latest Hugo, I actually had to make a minor change because it wasn’t updated to the very last version.
[module]
[module.hugoVersion]
extended = true
min = "0.87.0"
max = "0.128.1"The pattern for setting up configuration files consisted of copying the example site config, which is basically the same method as any other theme, except in this case it relies on multiple files, config/_default.
A number of things will need to be changed simply because of author information, and menus.
Features #
There are loads of features, the following stood out to me.
- Language support
- Extensive menu system
- Multiple authors
- Custom taxonomies
I couldn’t make use of language support, as I only know one language and this is going to be a personal site. The menu system I was able to make some use of, and as I’m able to post more content, it seems like it should keep up with my demands. While I’m not particularly interested in using it, multiple author support means that you could basically set up a full news site with multiple editors. This makes it scale way beyond just a personal blog.
The custom taxonomies were simple enough to use, and mean that I can post different content types and have a way to navigate to it through the menus. For instance, I’ve already created one for worldbuilding. And it’s just a one-liner!
world = "worlds"Appearance #
It’s a really smooth theme. If you’re willing to spend more than an hour on setup, it’s well worth it for all the graphical goodies you get with relatively little effort. There are various animated SVG backgrounds to choose from, if you like that kind of thing. The color themes are well-matched, and you can create your own as well, though I never dove that deep.
Final Word #
If you just want a really simple blog, this is going to be overkill. But in my opinion it is one of the best free themes you can get that’s not focused on documentation.