Unable to get the home page text rendered?

Using Themes
1

I’m a beginner who is recently starting to build a website using Hugo. When I was trying to set up a homepage, I do see the title of the homepage loaded in the build product, but no text content being rendered at all. I’m sure I put some text in the source file content/en/_index.md and content/zh/_index.md, but none of the text content even get rendered at all.
After some searching and comparing some starter templates, I’m still unable to find a way out, so I have no choice but to make a new post here.

The website is here, and the repo is here.

2

The theme’s home page template doesn’t call the .Content method:
https://github.com/CaiJimmy/hugo-theme-stack/blob/master/layouts/home.html

In the future please raise your theme-specific questions here:
https://github.com/CaiJimmy/hugo-theme-stack/discussions

3

Figured out that I can overwrite file in the layouts directory to get that variable called.

I’m not sure if I also get content directory structure wrong since I’m also attempting to set up a multi-language website (which every individual blog post would be prepared in 2-3 languages, may need to also work on the UI translation as well since the translation provided by the theme doesn’t distinguish some regional variance that I need). Also, the theme’s discussion page doesn’t seem to be very active, that’s why I actually post the question on both places.

4

I probably do mess up with the multi-lingual stuff, now site doesn’t build after I’ve added another post.

ERROR error building site: assemble: failed to create page from pageMetaSource /[pagename]: "[pagename].md:2:1": [1:1] string was used where mapping is expected
5

Please share the front matter for the page in question.

See Requesting Help.

Let us see your code

Include a link to the source code repository of your project, because we really need the context of seeing your templates and partials to be able to help you. It is trivial to do a quick git clone on your repo, then run hugo server in your project, to help you out. On the other hand, recreating your code from screenshots, or sort of guessing at it, is not.

If you can’t share your repository for whatever reason, consider creating a dummy repo that you can share, which reproduces the problem you’re experiencing.

6
7

You are using the wrong front matter delimiters.
https://gohugo.io/content-management/front-matter/#overview

8

Unfortunately, different documentations and starter templates seem to have conflicting information on that delimiter stuff, especially I see this starter template uses the minus symbol instead of the plus symbol for the delimiter.

Now, the desired result of the home page should have an additional block right at the top (containing the messages from _index.md), then followed by a list of the most recent post. The UI translations also doesn’t look right yet, and I would also need to get all the function pages (i.e. archives, searching, RSS feed, etc.) working. Not sure if it’s faster that I could find the answer on my own, or just go ask someone else more familiar with the framework.

9

No, they don’t. Each serialization format (TOML, YAML, JSON) has it’s own delimiters. Which format you use is entirely up to you.

10

Then what’s the config/criteria that determines which serialization format Hugo expects?

11

criteria that determines which serialization format Hugo expects

The delimiters.

12

Now, the desired result of the home page should have an additional block right at the top (containing the messages from _index.md), then followed by a list of the most recent post.

Okay, I found out the main problem. The homepage only loads content within the directory which specified in params.mainSections config. But even after setting this config into an empty string, it still doesn’t load content directly under the content/[lang] directory. I see somebody else does achieve this (loading content from the root directory onto the home page and RSS feed), but they don’t provide the source code so I’d have to work my way out.

13

Found out that you can add the following code snippet at the top of layouts/home.html to make the content of _index.md display properly:

{{ define "body-class" }}
  article-page
{{ end }}

The only thing left is content at the root directory, and i18n overwriting problems (which is not related to the homepage anyway though).