Theme or not theme?

1

Hello everyone,
I’m new to HUGO and I would like to hear your advice:

I’m developing my portfolio website using HUGO and I started using Victor Hugo by Netlify:

I like the idea to pipe the assets using Gulp etc…

Right now theme files, assets, archetypes are in the root folder, should I start to develop a theme instead?

More in general, when there are no themes ready, are you developing a theme from scratch or just work on root files?

Thank you!

2

My take on this is this:

Work in non-theme mode until you need a theme (either because you want more sites or other people want to use your theme).

I say this because

  • It just feels easier while developing the site to have everything in a fairly flat file structure
  • Creating a theme from a regular project is a very cheap operation (mostly a simple move)
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3

I had the same question starting out with HUGO.

I can safely say that there’s little point creating a theme unless, as @bep says you want more sites or other people to use the theme.

If you want to make a theme of your site at a later date, it should be relatively simple.

4

Even though I don’t care about others using my theme, I maintain a separate git repo for the theme so that my OCD based theme commits don’t mix with commits for my site repo, which I intend to mainly be content-related.

2 Likes
5

Thank you all, it makes sense.
Plus, I like the idea it’s easy to make a theme later for further applications.