What is the best option for building a product on Hugo? A theme, or building as a bespoke Hugo site?

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I am building what could turn into a product based on Hugo. I believe I can go one of three ways.

  1. Build it as a theme
  2. Build it as a bespoke site that uses Hugo (i.e., no theme - for example, GitHub - The-Mycelium-Network/webworkbook: A curated, digital, interactive book outlining a course of study with curated notes and exercises. Helping you build a web accessible by all through best practices, ethics, compassion and sustainability.)
  3. Combine the two. Build some common bits directly into the default layouts, archetypes, etc., and use a theme that only provides the layout, colors, typography, etc.

I am curious about the benefits and tradeoffs of the options listed above. There is most likely no right answer, but I would love to learn from those that have done this kind of thing before. Thanks!

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Themes are usually good forā€“

  1. those who are not knowledgeable enough to build their own layouts; or
  2. reusing across different sites.

If you donā€™t intend to do number two, just stick to the base Hugo layouts.

Personally, I use a theme because I like to declutter my Hugo project. So, I only keep the config, content, data, and static folders in the base and the rest (archetypes, assets, layouts, i18n) in a theme in the themes folder.

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Thanks, Arif. I do think I am starting to lean toward the approach you mentioned you prefer. Another benefit of defining the look & feel in a theme means one can offer different themes but have all the logic, content, shortcodes, and CMS integration bits in the base of Hugo. :thinking:

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Because ā€˜themeā€™ means a specific thing in Hugo I prefer to use the term ā€˜skinā€™ to describe a different look & feel and ā€˜themeā€™ to describe the ā€˜Hugo logicā€™ (layouts/* etc) that gets used with theme = xxxx in config.toml.

But thatā€™s just a personal preference for attempting to keep clear what I am referring to.

Another option is to not use the theme = line and just have what Iā€™d call a ā€˜skinā€™ Hugo module, and a layouts-logic module.

Themes as theme = is more relevant when not using Hugo modules, since it allows the use of git submodules or an archive (zip, tar.gz, etc) of the theme.

Some users on the forum like to decompose into many different modules (Iā€™m sure @davidsneighbour would love to opine on that) and use them as building blocks for the site.

I find the ā€˜bookkeepingā€™ associated with that more trouble than itā€™s worth, but it is an option.

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This sounds really interesting. Thanks, Daniel. I am going to read up some more about modules.

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I am evolving due to the complexities and length of building the site with (too) many modules :wink: currently working on a module that ā€œhas them allā€ in one single module.

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