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!