Issues with installing Zen theme

Using Themes
1

Hello everyone,

I’ve been trying to set up the Zen theme for my Hugo website, but I’m facing two main issues:

  1. Missing Content:
    After following the installation steps, some expected content sections are not appearing on my site. Even though I have created the necessary content files and placed them in the correct directories, the pages remain empty or show errors.
  2. Navigation Menu Not Displaying:
    Despite configuring a custom menu in my config.toml file—with entries for Home, Blog, Podcast, and others—the navigation menu does not show up on the live site. It seems that either the theme’s automatic menu generation is interfering or there might be an issue with the configuration.

I’ve double-checked my content and menu settings, but the problems persist. Has anyone encountered similar issues or found a workaround for these problems? Any suggestions or advice would be greatly appreciated.

Thank you in advance!

2

You are more likely to receive a prompt and accurate response if you post a link to your project’s Git repository.

See Requesting Help.

Let us see your code

Include a link to the source code repository of your project, because we really need the context of seeing your templates and partials to be able to help you. It is trivial to do a quick git clone on your repo, then run hugo server in your project, to help you out. On the other hand, recreating your code from screenshots, or sort of guessing at it, is not.

If you can’t share your repository for whatever reason, consider creating a dummy repo that you can share, which reproduces the problem you’re experiencing.

3

Hi,

I haven’t made any modifications to my project yet. I simply ran:

git submodule add GitHub - frjo/hugo-theme-zen: A fast and clean Hugo base theme with css-grid and Hugo pipes support. themes/zen

and then started the Hugo server to view the demo site provided by the theme. However, I noticed that the “menu in header” is not displaying and the corresponding content appears to be missing from the repository(blog,podcast,products,misc,search).

Since I haven’t added any custom content or configuration beyond adding the submodule, I’m wondering if this is expected behavior in the demo site or if I’m missing an extra step to properly display the header menu.

Any insight or guidance would be greatly appreciated. Thank you!

4

I did this and it worked great:

hugo new site foo
cd foo
git init
git submodule add https://github.com/frjo/hugo-theme-zen.git themes/zen
echo "theme = 'zen'" >> hugo.toml
cd themes/zen/exampleSite/
hugo server --themesDir ../..
5

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Hello,

I followed the same steps:

hugo new site foo
cd foo
git init
git submodule add https://github.com/frjo/hugo-theme-zen.git themes/zen
echo "theme = 'zen'" >> hugo.toml
cd themes/zen/exampleSite/
hugo server --themesDir ../..

This setup worked great for others, but in my case, the header menu is missing, and the content that should be linked to those menu items is also not present.

I haven’t made any modifications or added any custom content—I’m simply trying to view the demo site provided in the theme repository. It seems that either the demo configuration is incomplete or an additional step is required to display the header menu and its corresponding content.

Could someone clarify if there’s an extra configuration step I’m missing, or is this an issue with the demo site itself? Any guidance would be appreciated. Thank you!

6

The example site uses the configuration file (hugo.toml) from the exampleSite directory, and with a fresh installation of theme that config file doesn’t contain any menu entries.

Add something like this to themes/zen/exampleSite/hugo.yaml:

menus:
  main:
    - name: Home
      pageRef: /
      weight: 10
    - name: Posts
      pageRef: /posts
      weight: 20

This is a great example of why it is important to share your project when requesting help on this forum.