Questions about the quick start guide

Using Themes
1

I was consulting the quickstart and found that my memory serves me and we’re recommended thenewdynamic/gohugo-theme-ananke.

But I also see that, per the maintainer, it’s in maintenance mode.

I’m a huge fan of software being done at some point, and so more power to ananke maintainers and my thanks for many years of excellent awesomeness. But…I’d really like dark mode features and I’d like to see the ever-improving CSS capabilities come rolling into my site for free. I, and probably most would-be adopters, would benefit from active development.

On top of that, the quick start paths still to using git submodules versus – which seems out of sync with Hugo modules

  1. Is there some reason the default path to victory has not been updated
  2. Is there some other actively maintained theme that ought be the one would-be converts get exposed to first?

Thanks!

Steven

2

The “maintenance mode” message was posted on 3 Jan 2024 by one of the original Ananke maintainers, both of whom have left the project. Nine months later, on 23 Sep 2024, the original maintainers announced that @davidsneighbour was taking over the project.

Whether the Ananke project lead plans to add new features is a question for him, but he has put many hours of effort into the project since taking it over. Thank you @davidsneighbour .

Regarding the quick start guide and why it shows theme addition via Git submodules, I’ve written about this before:

  1. Adding a theme as a module has two dependencies: Git and Go. While you and I may consider Go installation a trivial task, our user base has a broad range of experience and skills, and this may be an impediment[1] to trial and/or adoption.
  2. When you add a theme as a module, the components (layouts, assets, etc.) are not visible. That means that a new user has no idea how the site is rendered, which template to override, etc. To see components they must run hugo mod vendor which copies the files to the _vendor directory, find what they need to find, then remember to delete the _vendor directory so that they can update the module in the future using hugo mod get -u github.com/user/hugo-theme.

We are working on restructuring the documentation. This includes a concept page describing the three methods to add an existing theme: cloning, adding a Git submodule, or adding a Hugo module. The quick start guide will (most likely) reference these methods, but will be modified to use something like:

hugo new site my-site
cd my-site
hugo new theme my-theme
echo "theme = 'my-theme'" >> hugo.toml
hugo server

The result is a functional example that:

  1. Doesn’t require Git, Go, Dart Sass, or Node.js
  2. Is always compatible with the current version of Hugo
  3. Demonstrates a subset of current features
  4. Is easy to explore and examine

  1. Either technical or, more likely, conceptual. “I don’t know Go.” “Go’s a programming language but I’m not a programmer.” “You mean everyone on my team has to install Go?” ↩︎

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