Showcasing ZORALab's Hestia - A Hugo Content Compiler Module

Showcases
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After months of development, I’m finally confident enough to showcase my 14th iterated theme module (2nd releasable module) for everyone to experience. Please enjoy and provides some feedbacks:

https://hestia.zoralab.com/

What’s So Special about This Module

Basically, I overdrive Hugo to be a full-scale compiler and took over many of the Hugo’s offered roles (e.g. multiple output formats, i18n, prohibited shortcodes & replaced with Hestia macro), and etc solely for consistent input data. So Hugo only do the following:

  1. Is a precise asset and content compiler - only parse used UI components’ CSS variables (including updating user provided values), CSS codes, JS codes and embed into the HTML file.
  2. acts as a simultaneous JSON data file server.
  3. Generates discover-able sitemap.xml strategy - instead of hard-limiting into 1 file (which has hard limits).
  4. Open-Graph + Twitter ready.
  5. Directory-driven data and configurations files.
  6. Each page is its own canvas.
  7. Also provides built-in UI components (In the showcase, it’s only HTML+CSS-only).

More info at: ZORALab's Hestia for Hugo

Why Develop Such Complex Theme

Basically, for front-end hosting WASM implementations in Phase 2 of the development. Hugo was tested and chosen because of its feature richness. Phase 1 was to make sure Hugo is capable of catering the following use cases:

  1. HTML + CSS only = noJS SEO static contents (HestiaUI Specifications).
  2. HTML + CSS + JS = usual static web contents.
  3. HTML + WASM = having Go/Rust to take over CSS and JS role.

PWA is enabled mainly for offline capability but it also solved those icons and favicons generator dependencies in 1 shot.

What’s Next?

I’ll tidy up the module and release version v0.1.0 only with HestiaHUGO (not now, hopefully before Jan 15). Some features I intend to include are:

  1. Commercial elements (e.g. AdSense, Stripe, etc) so that user can use the module for building commerce based items.
  2. Finally decide what to deal with 404.html (having trouble deciding fallback strategy with its language-specific redirect capability).
  3. Translate contents to zh-Hans to test out its i18n features.

Then I’ll enter Phase 2 which is to continue developing hestiaGO and hestiaRUST for full WASM takes over.

Please Star on GitHub

If you like what I had develop, please help me out by starring my project here:

For those that are curious:

  1. Module is in hestiaHUGO.
  2. The backend documents are in docs directory.
  3. Its data processing data system is at hestiaHUGO/layouts/partials/Hestia directory.

Feedback are greatly appreciated.

It’s Free

Yes, I mean it. Apache 2.0. No dirty tricks or whatever. =)

Site-note: thanks hugo dev team for making such a powerful compiler.

Thank you for your time. Merry Christmas!

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