I’m brand new to Hugo, and I’m quite enthused about it. I’ve built a template, and I think I’m on the right track, but I’m missing the Big Picture, High-Level view of how Hugo works. I believe I would get a great deal out of a high level, generalized understanding of how a site is generated. A few questions that spring to mind:
When I generate a site, where does Hugo look first? Where does it go from there? (Does it immediately go to my content directory and generate the variables it needs to understand my site? Or does it first go to my index file? Or somewhere else?) I think a generalized idea of the steps Hugo follows to assemble my site would be very helpful.
What are the most essential commands to embed in my content and partial files for Hugo to generate my site? Must I have a render command in there? Or will simply referencing the .content variable be enough? Maybe it’s either? Is range always needed, or only if I want to iterate through content for use in a single page? Something causes Hugo to look at my various content files and drag that information into my template to generate a final product, but I’ve had great difficulty figuring out what I really need to get the site built (rather than ending up with a bunch of blank pages).
I’ve looked extensively through the documentation, and there is a lot of detail but I’ve yet to find a good generalized description of how things flow within Hugo. If there is such a section that I’ve missed, please point me towards it.
Thanks!