Pages organization

In Hugo, pages are the core of your site. Once it is configured, pages are definitely the added value to your documentation site.

Folders

Organize your site like any other Hugo project. Typically, you will have a content folder with all your pages.

content
├── level-one
│   ├── level-two
│   │   ├── level-three
│   │   │   ├── level-four
│   │   │   │   ├── _index.md       <-- /level-one/level-two/level-three/level-four
│   │   │   │   ├── page-4-a.md     <-- /level-one/level-two/level-three/level-four/page-4-a
│   │   │   │   ├── page-4-b.md     <-- /level-one/level-two/level-three/level-four/page-4-b
│   │   │   │   └── page-4-c.md     <-- /level-one/level-two/level-three/level-four/page-4-c
│   │   │   ├── _index.md           <-- /level-one/level-two/level-three
│   │   │   ├── page-3-a.md         <-- /level-one/level-two/level-three/page-3-a
│   │   │   ├── page-3-b.md         <-- /level-one/level-two/level-three/page-3-b
│   │   │   └── page-3-c.md         <-- /level-one/level-two/level-three/page-3-c
│   │   ├── _index.md               <-- /level-one/level-two
│   │   ├── page-2-a.md             <-- /level-one/level-two/page-2-a
│   │   ├── page-2-b.md             <-- /level-one/level-two/page-2-b
│   │   └── page-2-c.md             <-- /level-one/level-two/page-2-c
│   ├── _index.md                   <-- /level-one
│   ├── page-1-a.md                 <-- /level-one/page-1-a
│   ├── page-1-b.md                 <-- /level-one/page-1-b
│   └── page-1-c.md                 <-- /level-one/page-1-c
├── _index.md                       <-- /
└── page-top.md                     <-- /page-top

Note

_index.md is required in each folder, it’s your “folder home page”

Create your project

The following steps are here to help you initialize your new website. If you don’t know Hugo at all, we strongly suggest you to train by following great documentation for beginners.

Hugo provides a new command to create a new website.

hugo new site <new_project>

The Relearn theme provides archetypes to help you create this kind of pages.

Frontmatter Configuration

Each Hugo page has to define a frontmatter in toml, yaml or json. This site will use toml in all cases.

The Relearn theme uses the following parameters on top of Hugo ones:

+++
# Table of contents (toc) is enabled by default. Set this parameter to true to disable it.
# Note: Toc is always disabled for chapter pages
disableToc = false
# If set, this will be used for the page's menu entry (instead of the `title` attribute)
menuTitle = ""
# If set to true, the menu in the sidebar will be displayed in a collapsible tree view. Although the functionality works with old browsers (IE11), the display of the expander icons is limited to modern browsers
collapsibleMenu = false
# If set, this will explicitly override common rules for the expand state of a page's menu entry
alwaysopen = true
# If set, this will explicitly override common rules for the sorting order of a page's submenu entries
ordersectionsby = "weight"
# The title of the page heading will be prefixed by this HTML content
headingPre = ""
# The title of the page heading will be postfixed by this HTML content
headingPost = ""
# The title of the page in menu will be prefixed by this HTML content
menuPre = ""
# The title of the page in menu will be postfixed by this HTML content
menuPost = ""
# Hide a menu entry by setting this to true
hidden = false
# Display name of this page modifier. If set, it will be displayed in the footer.
LastModifierDisplayName = ""
# Email of this page modifier. If set with LastModifierDisplayName, it will be displayed in the footer
LastModifierEmail = ""
# Override default values for image effects, you can even add your own arbitrary effects to the list
[params.imageEffects]
  border = false
  lightbox = true
  shadow = false
+++

In the page frontmatter, add a menuPre param to insert any HTML code before the menu label. The example below uses the GitHub icon.

+++
title = "GitHub repo"
menuPre = "<i class='fab fa-github'></i> "
+++

Ordering sibling menu/page entries

Hugo provides a flexible way to handle order for your pages.

The simplest way is to set weight parameter to a number.

+++
title = "My page"
weight = 5
+++

By default, the Relearn theme will use a page’s title attribute for the menu item (or linkTitle if defined).

But a page’s title has to be descriptive on its own while the menu is a hierarchy. We’ve added the menuTitle parameter for that purpose:

For example (for a page named content/install/linux.md):

+++
title = "Install on Linux"
menuTitle = "Linux"
+++

You can change how the theme expands menu entries on the side of the content with the alwaysopen setting on a per page basis. If alwaysopen=false for any given entry, its children will not be shown in the menu as long as it is not necessary for the sake of navigation.

The theme generates the menu based on the following rules:

all parent entries of the active page including their siblings are shown regardless of any settings
immediate children entries of the active page are shown regardless of any settings
if not overridden, all other first level entries behave like they would have been given alwaysopen=false
if not overridden, all other entries of levels besides the first behave like they would have been given alwaysopen=true
all visible entries show their immediate children entries if alwaysopen=true; this proceeds recursively
all remaining entries are not shown

You can see this feature in action on the example page for children shortcode and its children pages.

Disable Section Pages

You may want to structure your pages in a hierachical way but don’t want to generate pages for those sections? The theme got you covered.

To stay with the initial example: Suppose you want level-one appear in the sidebar but don’t want to generate a page for it. So the entry in the sidebar should not be clickable but should show an expander.

For this, open content/level-one/_index.md and add the following frontmatter

collapsibleMenu = true # this adds the expander to the menu entry if not already set in your config.toml
[_build]
  render = "never" # no page will be generated so the page does not have a url