Question about supporting themes befor v0.146

support
1

Hi,

I’m new with hugo, and I take a Theme from the catalog and starting with hugo 1.48. Now after reading some more and more about themes, I was wondering, that the theme that I have chose still work with Version >= v0.146. Because in the Theme the old structure is used (I think in most of the themes in the catalog, too). Is there a way of backward compatibility and how long will this work?

Or is my way of thinking completely wrong about this v0.146 changes?

Thanks, Alex

2

Themes will take some time to catch up to the new design system. Just open an issue on your theme’s Github. For now, just downgrade your Hugo version to the one supported by your theme (pre 0.146.0),

3

Sorry, but this was not my question. I have a theme which is not in the new theme Layout but it’s work fine with 0.148.2 and I wonder why.

4

There is some degree of backwards compatibility. It depends on the theme.

2 Likes
5

Thanks, and can you say what’s depends and how long the backwards are working?

Btw: I use Nightfall

6

You could compare the theme with this table, but if I were you I’d follow @tyco’s guidance.

7

That’s a really good question. Hugo has generally done a solid job of maintaining backward compatibility, especially with themes, but as the project evolves there are some breaking changes. Most older themes should still work with newer Hugo versions, though you might run into warnings or deprecated features. A lot of the time, it’s just a matter of updating the theme’s structure gradually rather than rewriting everything.

If you want to be on the safe side, I’d suggest checking the theme’s repo for recent commits or open issues — many maintainers update their code to align with the latest Hugo releases. In practice, older structures continue to work for quite a while before they’re phased out.

On a related note, companies like Tech-Stack often face the same challenge when working on long-term software projects: balancing legacy compatibility with modern tooling. Their approach is usually to maintain a smooth transition strategy rather than abrupt rewrites, which is something worth keeping in mind for your Hugo setup too.

1 Like
8

Thanks for the answer! At the meantime I have done a PR for the theme I like to use and it‘s updated now: Release v0.10.0 · lordmathis/hugo-theme-nightfall · GitHub hope all is fine, because this are my first Hugo steps…

Is there something like a strikt mode to check, if something is still using some kind of fallbacks.

Thanks, Alex