Help with choosing a theme for an event

Hi all,
I am organising an event (more or less a mountain trek) and would like to create a hugo-based website for it. I have almost no website experience and the only site I ever built with hugo is my own, based on Academic.
What I need for this site is:

  • A large banner with a cool image on top, to catch the reader’s attention
  • A drop down menu (or similar) for viewing archived past occurrences of the same event
  • The possibility to insert google maps / leaflet widget(s), maybe even with the ability to insert the path that will be taken by the attendees
  • A very simple schedule
  • No need for full blog-style pages, but an “updates” section might be useful
  • Contacts, share etc.
  • Multilanguage
  • Reactive (phone/desktop)
  • A form for subscribing (free: something built-in, mail form or link to google forms?)
  • Section for organisational details (rules, what to bring, etc.)

Is there any specific theme that fits the bill without inserting any (or much) custom JS code? Maybe the following themes could be suited for the task:

  • ananke
  • hero
  • grayscale
  • conference
  • devfest

I have no experience with these so I do not know if they are flexible enough to adapt to this usage. Maybe they all are, but having never used any Hugo theme other than Academic (which is probably not suited for this) I do not know!

Thanks in advance for any hint.

Hi!

This is a very specific use case and I cannot tell you, whether an open source Hugo theme fits to all your demands.

I maintain a number of large-scale websites with calendar/events functionalities, but unfortunately they are not open source (yet).

Yet, I can highly recommend this article. You can see how easy it is to create a calendar template and calendar data files.

So my suggestion is to look for an appropriate theme and simply add a calendar template as described in the article.

If you have any questions about the calendar template, feel free to ask.

Off the top of my head, Airspace Hugo comes to mind. I’ve used it before, and I think it fulfills most of your criteria. It doesn’t have a built-in calendar, though.

I agree about Airspace.
And you can add a Google calendar easily

Thank you for your suggestions! Airspace looks good, I’ll test it out.
If anybody has any other suggestion, I’d be very glad to hear them

Airspace’s documentation seems very limited to me, unless I am missing something. Is this the case with all themes? I was used to Academic, whose documentation is almost as extensive as hugo’s itself!

Most of the themes have pretty limited documentation, in my experience. I’ve never tried Academic, so I can’t compare the two, but I’d imagine that given its popularity Academic has more documentation.

Yeah, Academic’s documentation is super good. As I don’t have much free time to build the side, and this is just a fun sideproject, I might try to go for a more well-documented theme. In any case it’s too early to say, I’ll test some of the mentioned themes in more depth next weekend.