A while back I posted a loosely-related idea about supporting feature/behavior tests to kickstart a distributed/community effort to codify features. It probably isn’t necessary for your idea, but it could be helpful. I just wanted to cross-link this in case anyone does attempt to work towards this.
Hello,
I’m working on something and hopefully people will like it. I’ll post to this thread / discuss and can’t wait for feedback, probably around 2 weeks
Regards.
Yes. In the end, you still have to do the work.
BAH! exclamation… Kids these days…
I do not need flexible. Markdown is great, I like it. It has rigid conventions, it is small and light, all good. The gui stuff was not my idea, I can live without that. Markdown, with FEATURES. Not themes, but individual styles that can be easily chosen from somewhere and installed, then easily used with a few keys in markdown would be super good!
Currently, I must pick a “theme”. But these are kinda big… I like some parts of this one, and that one has XYZ, but how to extract the bits I like? Then there is a big mess of files, and … but I just want that ONE part… How can I get that one part, and use it? the requires some archeology, and factoring, and pain.
I think the pain is caused by the way things are packaged. The idea of themes is good, but I want to pick PARTS of themes. But those are not packaged. they are bundled, and tied to many other things…
GUI or not, fine. give me a pile of them, alphabetically, with descriptions. I can Git the ones I want…
Then have Hugo weave it all together.
Sub-Themes, or Features, not sure what to call this…
Last, thanks for your thoughts! Idea #1 of yours, seems to fit what I am thinking.
#2, not a fan of JS. I prefer type-safe languages, and think JS is an abomination 
Abathur also seems to have eerily similar thoughts.
And RDwatters, can you expand on that a bit? why are you not a fan of #1 in particular?
THANKS SO MUCH for your more informed than I insight… Much appreciated! (exclamation again…)
You don’t have to pick a theme. If you build it from scratch, you build the same sorts of files but at the top of the site, instead of under the theme’s folder.
First hugo site I did a couple years ago, I used a theme to see what it was about, then overrode everything in the theme little by little, until finally, no theme files at all.
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Yeh, my first tests used a theme, then decided just to build something from scratch myself using a Framework.
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@RobertCvn I think that what you are asking for could be divided into two parts:
- Blocks to build your page structure;
- Reusable and specific blocks such as a slideshow, an image gallery, a post list, a contact form, a menu, or the current page’s table of content.
For the first part, I believe this would be well suited inside a GUI. But I assume that if you already know HTML/CSS a little, you can manage this relatively easily with libraries like Bootstrap. Now, maybe there is a lack in the current/upcoming documentation to lead the end user to build an entire theme from scratch and we can enhance.
For the second part, I have made some work, which you can find here for the presentation, and here for my implementation of that widget mechanism. I actually use it for one of my projects. I will release it soon.
I have personally developed the following widgets, which I use:
- blog: a blog of all last articles from a specific taxonomy
- chapo: the article heading as a Chapô
- debug: the current context
- figure: a figure
- last-posts: lists the n last posts
- menu: displays a menu
- search: simple form to search the site with Google
- section-pages: lists the pages that are children of this page
- table-of-contents: display a table of content of the current page
- text: an arbitrary text. Can be plain HTML.
These widgets are placed in a directory and called inside the config file. Then you can easily rearrange them to fit your needs.
If ever you are interested in using widgets, let me know!
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Lebarde, that is well written and clear. And it fits my thoughts. Good job.
Very interested in trying this.
Hello @RobertCvn, I will update my code to the latest Hugo version and write an article somewhere to get a good quick start guide on how to use widgets. I will tell you about this.
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Great!
I see two ways to get where I want to go:
- start with nothing, and build it up by adding Widgets, love the name, the last consulting company I owned was called Industrial Mega-Widgets, inc, so…
- Start with something bigger, yet configurable. I love the way this guy thinks, too. https://github.com/kakawait/hugo-tranquilpeak-theme/blob/master/docs/user.md#tranquilpeak-configuration
He gives a full featured theme, but allows one to disable what is not wanted.
Either way gets us to the same place. Start small and build up, or start big, and chip away at it.
Option 2 has the advantage of an entire build pipeline, documented, with newish tech to automate stuff. That was all educational to me, as I had been struggling with those issues. But he does not use the shiniest CSS, or the correct JS base packages 