Setting PublishDate in an archetype?

support
1

I’m attempting to ensure that the PublishDate is set on content when it is generated with hugo new. What do I need to put in the frontmatter of the archetype to get this parameter set?

2

@mattstratton you have to create a new file in archetype directory named as default.md

and can put any information, normally date is automatically added when you create archetype for post.

+++
tags = [“x”, “y”]
categories = [“x”, “y”]
PublishDate = “”
+++

Check normally PublishDate is automatically added but if you want you can assign it too.

3

Yeah, we have custom archetypes all over the place, but PublishDate never gets set. I’ll try adding a blank field for it.

4

@mattstratton Any luck with this? I have three date parameters: date,publishdate, and updated in a theme I’m working on. If I don’t set the field to anything I get null…

5

I attempted this. I have an archetype defined at archetypes/speaker.md with the following contents:

+++
Title = ""
Twitter = ""
Homepage = ""
PublishDate = ""
+++

Then I run this command: hugo new events/2017-ponyville/speakers/rainbow-dash.md -k speaker

This results in the following content at content/events/2017-ponyville/speakers/rainbow-dash.md

+++
Homepage = ""
PublishDate = ""
Title = "rainbow dash"
Twitter = ""
date = "2016-12-08T20:55:58-06:00"

+++

So it seems that PublishDate doesn’t actually get set after all.

This isn’t necessarily completely the end of the world for us, as we have our content folks add content via a shell script rather than calling hugo new directly, so we can do a replace or something as part of the script, but it would be nice to have.

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6

Did you ever figure this out? The default field in the default archetype that is now built in Hugo (v.24.1) for me looks like this:

---
title: "{{ replace .TranslationBaseName "-" " " | title }}"
date: {{ .Date }}
draft: true
---

So maybe putting that {{ .Date }} in there will do what you want with publishdate =

7

(Not tested) you could also try using the AddDate function :smile:

8

Your example has publishDate set to blank, which matches your output just fine. And @gaetawoo is right, Hugo >= 0.24 has much more powerful archetype handling – with template support and, most notable: Other than the template parsing, we just use the archetype file as-is, so what you put in there is what you will get in the resulting content file.

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