Lists of categories on front page

I am trying migrate a WordPress blog to Hugo: current blog is here .

How can I include lists of categories and monthly archives on the front page? Like there is in the right column on the WordPress blog.

My code is here: GitHub - mikaelstaldal/tech-blog: Mikael Ståldal’s technical blog

$ hugo env
hugo v0.119.0-b84644c008e0dc2c4b67bd69cccf87a41a03937e+extended linux/amd64 BuildDate=2023-09-24T15:20:17Z VendorInfo=snap:0.119.0
GOOS="linux"
GOARCH="amd64"
GOVERSION="go1.21.1"
github.com/sass/libsass="3.6.5"
github.com/webmproject/libwebp="v1.2.4"
github.com/sass/dart-sass/protocol="2.2.0"
github.com/sass/dart-sass/compiler="1.68.0"
github.com/sass/dart-sass/implementation="1.68.0"

Render the list of terms in the categories taxonomy with something like:

{{ range site.Taxonomies.categories.Alphabetical }}
  <a href="{{ .Page.RelPermalink }}">{{ .Page.LinkTitle }}</a>
{{ end }}

Automatically creating an archive structure (as you describe here) is not so trivial; it is not a built-in capability.

The best I’ve come up with is:

git clone --single-branch -b hugo-forum-topic-46777 https://github.com/jmooring/hugo-testing hugo-forum-topic-46777
cd hugo-forum-topic-46777
rm -rf prebuild/public/ public/ && hugo -s prebuild && hugo server -e production

Read the readme.

Building twice may seem complicated, but (a) you only need to do that when deploying your site, and (b) it beats stuffing each page with front matter that is easy to get wrong.