Not that any of us can’t put formatted text into the html of a partial but looking down the road a noob is not going to be happy if he/she hears “if you need to change the text in the footer just edit the footer partial html in the layouts directory”
Possible non hugo solutions are using jquery to insert a rendered file stored within /content or yuck an iframe. Many drawbacks to these.
There have been some others posting about this.
http://discuss.gohugo.io/t/creating-static-content-that-uses-partials/265.
These tiny “bits”/“shorts” of markdown to be rendered are really not “content” in the sense of needing frontmatter, etc and being available with via {{ .Content }}.
So I guess I am opening the discussion to current workarounds and future support.
On the later here is one idea: a new (sub)directory (like the markdown (/shortmd) equivalent of shortcodes in the layout directory). Any md files in that directory are rendered (first) into html and then some mustache hook is provided so they can be inserted by, say, their filename into any html in a layout file.
Here is a typical use example. I have some author info that goes in a small panel in a sidebar (like at spf13.com) but rather than having to edit the /layouts/partials/details.html file and then finding the part in that file to edit. Instead I edit a md “short” file /shortmd/author.md and in details.html there is some mustache code like {{ .Mdinject “author” }} put there by a “coder”.
Note: this mustache code could be put in its own div/class so that it can easily be styled different than the main content.
So…If one can inject html(hugo) into md files with shortcodes then how about the antithesis injecting shortmds into html. Thoughts?