Any good documentation on Hugo?

support
1

Is there any good documentation about Hugo anywhere on the web?

The docs on Hugo’s website itself are clearly made with very little theory of mind (the “quick start” is actually broken): nothing is really actually explained for people who don’t already know this stuff, something too common amongst people who coded something and then try to document it.

The external documentation linked to on Hugo’s website is heavily outdated and therefore totally useless.

Looking at this forum, there were numerous people making the project aware of this but were sadly met with arrogant ignorance. But if Hugo wants to be used by more and more people then the docs need to be improved a lot.

2

I have used chatGPT when generating my own site, and referencing the docs when the AI made mistakes (like putting GO or Python code in Hugo code). The question about the Hugo documentation goes far back when I searched the forum and the Hugo Docs Repo.

I was frustrated a lot also when I began testing Hugo (which I recently chose over Jekyll), but Hugo does have a learning curve (which is acknowledged). I have spent close to 80 hours on one site alone!

Hugo, unlike other SSGs, has only one (volunteer) maintainer and few other volunteers. So, things do tend to move at a snail’s pace. But there has been a few discussions around improving the documentation (e.g. GitHub - gohugoio/gohugoioTheme2: Work in progress.). But sadly, this is a multi-year project.

Hugo is also still in the alpha stage (0.x), although it is production ready. With the way things change rapidly, anything usually past several months becomes outdated quickly. So, it is up to the external resources authors to update their works, which they rarely do. So, the Hugo documentation becomes the most up to date reference for users.

2 Likes
3

What issue did you have with the quickstart. Just tried it and it seems to work ok for me.

Hugo is an open source project and as @karis mentions there is few developers any near zero budget.

The documentation is really good as a reference, when you know the basics.

If you are not a developer and not used to other SSGs there is a significant learning curve. There is no specific Hugo documentation for that.

I think most people using Hugo to build sites are developers, for us it is an excellent tool.

I must say I’m impressed by people like @karis who put it all the hours to learn it. But knowledge is an easy burdon to carry :slight_smile:.

When you know how one SSG work, like Hugo, you can fairly easily pick up another in my experience.

3 Likes
4

I have to admit that Jekyll’s syntax was much easier to grasp, but the dependencies turned me off! One of Hugo’s greatest strengths is its single binary feature (which you can easily wget in Linux and sudo dpkg -i and you have a new Hugo version in less than a minute).