Impressed returning to Hugo!

tips & tricks
1

Hi all!

I used Hugo from early 2021 to early 2023, with only occasional maintenance commits from 2024 forwards (no Hugo layouts programming). I’ve returned to Hugo this past month after writing a standalone single-page index.html website, and wanting to restyle my main Hugo websites in a similar way, and I must say I’m impressed with how Hugo has evolved!

The documentation has improved:

  • From October 2023 to November 2023 (docs 723a827fd part of v0.121.0), ‘methods’ was added to the sidebar, reworking ‘variables’ (GitHub #2196). They’re also much clearer as to what types they return compared to the eg ‘page variables’.
  • From early February 2024 to mid February 2024 (docs 9f9a9315f shortly after v0.123.0 which I’m reading was a big release!), ‘variables’ was removed from the sidebar.
  • From early February 2025 to mid February 2025 (docs about v0.146.0) a nicer documentation homepage was added with the ‘functions’ and ‘methods’ etc clickable in the main center section not just on the sidebar.

A better layouts structure was added in April 2025 (v146). My favorite layout rename has been ‘index.html’ → ‘home.html’. I never liked how the ‘index.html’ template didn’t line up with the ‘_index.html’ section content file lol. It’s also made page ‘kinds’ clearer to me for some reason.

A few other things like the config ‘LanguageCode’ → ‘Locale’ in March 2026 (v0.158.0) and adding ‘.Page.IsBranch’ (for sections taxonomies and terms) in June 2026 (v0.163.0) are cool too. Don’t worry I won’t repeat the entire git log in this post, just nice changes I’ve noticed.

It’s great to see Hugo survive the big rise-and-fall wave of early 2020s “learn to code” webdev. (The earliest git commits in my Hugo repositories are from 2021 and use my old ‘@users.noreply.github.com’ email address so don’t worry I’m not judging lol, that’s also when I got back into programming.) I’m aware that Hugo existed well before then, and perhaps its endurance comes from being a static site generator not a flavour-of-the-week JavaScript framework (there was almost 1 a week in 2020-2022). However primarily I can see that a lot of hard work has been put in by the developers and documenters to get it to this modern state. So thanks a lot for that!

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Awesome then. Awesome now.

Thank you Hugo team.

3

I’m continually impressed by the way that Hugo has evolved, and is evolving.

So much so that I’m planning to migrate (almost) all the websites I maintain to Hugo, abandoning Middleman (not before time) and my own personal XML-based framework.

I’ve been using Hugo off-and-on for a while, and it can sometimes be hard to keep pace with the speed of change. There’s a fairly steady trickle of new features and ‘best practices’ and reading the comprehensive but somewhat terse changelogs doesn’t always give you what you need to stay current with the currently-approved Hugo way of structuring things or doing things.

I’m not sure what would be the best way to ease transitions for both old and new adopters, but maybe there’s a need for an annotated sample project, or a tutorial that showcases the core elements of a Hugo project? Or do these already exist? (I know there are sample themes and Hugo will scaffold projects for you, but Hugo is now complex enough that digging into the samples without at least some handholding can be challenging).

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Thanks for sharing this! Really interesting to hear the perspective of someone returning to Hugo after a few years. I agree , the clearer template structure and documentation are great improvements. And the git log details were actually interesting :grinning_face_with_smiling_eyes: