What's new

This document shows you what’s new in the latest release. For a detailed list of changes, see the history page.

Breaking: A change that requires action by you after upgrading to assure the site is still functional.

Change: A change in default behavior. This may requires action by you / may or may not be revertable by configuration.

New: Marks new behavior you might find interesting or comes configurable.

4.2.0

• Breaking: The second parameter for the include shortcode was switched in meaning and was renamed from showfirstheading to hidefirstheading. If you haven’t used this parameter in your shortcode, the default behavior hasn’t changed and you don’t need to change anything.

  If you’ve used the second boolean parameter, you have to rename it and invert its value to achive the same behavior.

• Change: Previously, if the tabs shortcode could not find a tab item because, the tabs ended up empty. Now the first tab is selected instead.

• New: All shortcodes can now be also called from your partials. Examples for this are added to the documentation of each shortcode.

4.1.0

• New: While fixing issues with the search functionality for non latin languages, you can now configure to have multiple languages on a single page.

4.0.0

• Breaking: The custom_css config parameter was removed from the configuration. If used in an existing installation, it can be achieved by overriding the custom-header.html template in a much more generic manner.

• Breaking: Because anchor hover color was not configurable without introducing more complexitity to the variant stylesheets, we decided to remove --MAIN-ANCHOR-color instead. You don’t need to change anything in your custom color stylesheet as the anchors now get their colors from --MAIN-LINK-color and --MAIN-ANCHOR-HOVER-color respectivley.

• New: All shortcodes now support named parameter. The positional parameter are still supported but will not be enhanced with new features, so you don’t need to change anything in your installation.

  This applies to expand, include, notice and siteparam.

• New: The button shortcode received some love and now has a parameter for the color style similar to other shortcodes.

• New: New colors --PRIMARY-color and --SECONDARY-color were added to provide easier modification of your custom style. Shortcodes with a color style can now have primary or secondary as additional values.

  These two colors are the default for other, more specific color variables. You don’t need to change anything in your existing custom color stylesheets as those variables get reasonable default values.

• New: The documentation for all shortcodes were revised.

3.4.0

• Breaking: If you had previously overwritten the custom-footer.html partial to add visual elements below the content of your page, you have to move this content to the new partial content-footer.html. custom-footer.html was never meant to contain HTML other than additional styles and JavaScript.

• New: If you prefer expandable/collapsible menu items, you can now set collapsibleMenu=true in your config.toml. This will add arrows to all menu items that contain sub menus. The menu will expand/collapse without navigation if you click on an arrow.

• New: You can activate print support in your config.toml to add the capability to print whole chapters or even the complete site.

• New: Translation for Traditional Chinese.

3.3.0

• New: Introduction of new CSS variables to set the font. The theme distinguishs between --MAIN-font for all content text and --CODE-font for inline or block code. There are additional overrides for all headings. See the theme variant generator of the exampleSite for all available variables.

• New: The new shortcode swagger is available to include a UI for REST OpenAPI Specifications. See the documentation for available features. This feature will not work with Internet Explorer 11.

3.2.0

• Change: In this release the Mermaid JavaScript library will only be loaded on demand if the page contains a Mermaid shortcode or is using Mermaid codefences. This changes the behavior of disableMermaid config option as follows: If a Mermaid shortcode or codefence is found, the option will be ignored and Mermaid will be loaded regardlessly.

  The option is still useful in case you are using scripting to set up your graph. In this case no shortcode or codefence is involved and the library is not loaded by default. In this case you can set disableMermaid=false in your frontmatter to force the library to be loaded. See the theme variant generator of the exampleSite for an example.

  This change requires at least Hugo 0.93.0 to be used. The minimum requirement will be reported during build on the console if not met.

• New: Additional color variant variable --MERMAID-theme to set the variant’s Mermaid theme. This causes the Mermaid theme to switch with the color variant if it defers from the setting of the formerly selected color variant.

3.1.0

• New: attachment and notice shortcodes have a new parameter to override the default icon. Allowed values are all Font Awesome 5 Free icons.

3.0.0

• Breaking: We made changes to the menu footer. If you have your menu-footer.html partial overridden, you may have to review the styling (eg. margins/paddings) in your partial. For a reference take a look into the menu-footer.html partial that is coming with the exampleSite.

  This change was made to allow your own menu footer to be placed right after the so called prefooter that comes with the theme (containing the language switch and Clear history functionality).

• Breaking: We have changed the default colors from the original Learn theme (the purple menu header) to the Relearn defaults (the light green menu header) as used in the official documentation.

  This change will only affect your installation if you’ve not set the themeVariant parameter in your config.toml. If you still want to use the Learn color variant, you have to explicitly set themeVariant="learn" in your config.toml.

  Note, that this will also affect your site if viewed with Internet Explorer 11 but in this case it can not be reconfigured as Internet Explorer does not support CSS variables.

• Change: Due to a bug, that we couldn’t fix in a general manner for color variants, we decided to remove --MENU-SEARCH-BOX-ICONS-color and introduced --MENU-SEARCH-color instead. You don’t need to change anything in your custom color stylesheet as the old name will be used as a fallback.

• Change: For consistency reasons, we renamed --MENU-SEARCH-BOX-color to --MENU-SEARCH-BORDER-color. You don’t need to change anything in your custom color stylesheet as the old name will be used as a fallback.

• New: With this release you are now capable to define your own dark mode variants.

  To make this possible, we have introduced a lot more color variables you can use in your color variants. Your old variants will still work and don’t need to be changed as apropriate fallback values are used by the theme. Nevertheless, the new colors allow for much more customization.

  To see what’s now possible, see the new variants relearn-dark and neon that are coming with this release.

• New: To make the creation of new variants easier for you, we’ve added a new interactive theme variant generator. This feature will not work with Internet Explorer 11.

• New: You can now configure multiple color variants in your config.toml. In this case, the first variant is the default chosen on first view and a variant switch will be shown in the menu footer. See the documentation for configuration.

  Note, that the new variant switch will not work with Internet Explorer 11 as it does not support CSS variables. Therefore, the variant switcher will not be displayed with Internet Explorer 11.

2.9.0

• Breaking: This release removes the themes implementation of ref/relref in favor for Hugos standard implementation. This is because of inconsistencies with the themes implementation. In advantage, your project becomes standard complient and exchanging this theme in your project to some other theme will be effortless.

  In a standard complient form you must not link to the *.md file but to its logical name. You’ll see, referencing other pages becomes much easier. All three types result in the same reference:

  Type	Non-Standard	Standard
  Branch bundle	basics/configuration/_index.md	basics/configuration
  Leaf bundle	basics/configuration/index.md	basics/configuration
  Page	basics/configuration.md	basics/configuration

  If you’ve linked from a page of one language to a page of another language, conversion is a bit more difficult but Hugo got you covered as well.

  Also, the old themes implementation allowed refs to non-existing content. This will cause Hugos implementation to show the error below and abort the generation. If your project relies on this old behavior, you can reconfigure the error handling of Hugos implementation.

  In the best case your usage of the old implementation is already standard complient and you don’t need to change anything. You’ll notice this very easily once you’ve started hugo server after an upgrade and no errors are written to the console.

  You may see errors on the console after the update in the form:

  ERROR 2021/11/19 22:29:10 [en] REF_NOT_FOUND: Ref "basics/configuration/_index.md": "hugo-theme-relearn\exampleSite\content\_index.en.md:19:22": page not found
  

  In this case, you must apply one of two options:

  1. Copy the old implementation files theme/hugo-theme-relearn/layouts/shortcode/ref.html and theme/hugo-theme-relearn/layouts/shortcode/relref.html to your own projects layouts/shortcode/ref.html and layouts/shortcode/relref.html respectively. This is not recommended as your project will still rely on non-standard behavior afterwards.

  2. Start up a text editor with regular expression support for search and replace. Apply the following conversions in the given order on all *.md files. This is the recommended choice.

  Type	Search	Replace by
  Branch bundle	(ref\s+"[^"]*)/_index\.md"	$1"
  Leaf bundle	(ref\s+"[^"]*)/index\.md"	$1"
  Page	(ref\s+"[^"]*)\.md"	$1"

2.8.0

• Change: Although never officially documented, this release removes the font Novacento/Novecento. If you use it in an overwritten CSS please replace it with Work Sans. This change was necessary as Novacento did not provide all Latin special characters and lead to mixed styled character text eg. for czech.

• New: The theme now supports favicons served from static/images/ named as favicon or logo in SVG, PNG or ICO format out of the box. An overridden partial layouts/partials/favicon.html may not be necessary anymore in most cases.

• New: You can hide the table of contents menu for the whole site by setting the disableToc option in your config.toml. For an example see the example configuration.

2.7.0

• New: Optional second parameter for notice shortcode to set title in box header.

2.6.0

• New: Your site can now be served from a subfolder if you set baseURL and canonifyURLs=true in your config.toml. See the documentation for a detailed example.

2.5.0

• Change: New colors --CODE-BLOCK-color and --CODE-BLOCK-BG-color were added to provide a fallback for Hugos syntax highlightning in case guessSyntax=true is set. Ideally the colors are set to the same values as the ones from your chosen chroma style.

2.4.0

• Change: Creation of customized stylesheets was simplified down to only contain the CSS variables. Everything else can and should be deleted from your custom stylesheet to assure everything works fine. For the predefined stylesheet variants, this change is already included.

• New: Hidden pages are displayed by default in their according tags page. You can now turn off this behavior by setting disableTagHiddenPages=true in your config.toml.

• New: You can define the expansion state of your menus for the whole site by setting the alwaysopen option in your config.toml. Please see further documentation for possible values and default behavior.

• New: New frontmatter ordersectionsby option to change immediate children sorting in menu and children shortcode. Possible values are title or weight.

• New: Alternate content of a page is now advertised in the HTML meta tags. See Hugo documentation.

2.3.0

• New: Showcase multilanguage features by provding a documentation translation “fer us pirrrates”. There will be no other translations besides the original English one and the Pirates one due to maintenance constraints.

2.2.0

• New: Hidden pages are displayed by default in the sitemap generated by Hugo and are therefore visible for search engine indexing. You can now turn off this behavior by setting disableSeoHiddenPages=true in your config.toml.

2.1.0

• Change: In case the site’s structure contains addional *.md files not part of the site (eg files that are meant to be included by site pages - see CHANGELOG.md in the exampleSite), they will now be ignored by the search.

• New: Hidden pages are indexed for the site search by default. You can now turn off this behavior by setting disableSearchHiddenPages=true in your config.toml.

• New: If a search term is found in an expand shortcode, the expand will be opened.

• New: The menu will scroll the active item into view on load.

2.0.0

• Change: Syntaxhighlightning was switched to the built in Hugo mechanism. You may need to configure a new stylesheet or decide to roll you own as described on in the Hugo documentation

• Change: In the predefined stylesheets there was a typo and --MENU-HOME-LINK-HOVERED-color must be changed to --MENU-HOME-LINK-HOVER-color. You don’t need to change anything in your custom color stylesheet as the old name will be used as a fallback.

• Change: --MENU-HOME-LINK-color and --MENU-HOME-LINK-HOVER-color were missing in the documentation. You should add them to your custom stylesheets if you want to override the defaults.

• Change: Arrow navigation and children shortcode were ignoring setting for ordersectionsby. This is now changed and may result in different sorting order of your sub pages.

• Change: If hidden pages are accessed directly by typing their URL, they will be exposed in the menu.

• Change: A page without a title will be treated as hidden=true.

• New: You can define the expansion state of your menus in the frontmatter. Please see further documentation for possible values and default behavior.

• New: New partials for defining pre/post content for menu items and the content. See documentation for further reading.

• New: Shortcode children with new parameter containerstyle.

• New: New shortcode include to include arbitrary file content into a page.

1.2.0

• New: Shortcode expand with new parameter to open on page load.

1.1.0

• New: Mermaid config options can be set in config.toml.

1.0.0

• New: Initial fork of the Learn theme based on Learn 2.5.0 on 2021-07-01. This introduces no new features besides a global rename to Relearn and a new logo. For the reasons behind forking the Learn theme, see this comment in the Learn issues.

Requirements

Thanks to the simplicity of Hugo, this page is as empty as this theme needs requirements.

Just download latest version of Hugo binary for your OS (Windows, Linux, Mac) : it’s that simple.

Installation

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

Create your project

Hugo provides a new command to create a new website.

hugo new site <new_project>

Install the theme

Install the Relearn theme by following this documentation

This theme’s repository is: https://github.com/McShelby/hugo-theme-relearn.git

Alternatively, you can download the theme as .zip file and extract it in the themes directory

Basic configuration

When building the website, you can set a theme by using --theme option. However, we suggest you modify the configuration file (config.toml) and set the theme as the default. You can also add the [outputs] section to enable the search functionality.

# Change the default theme to be use when building the site with Hugo
theme = "hugo-theme-relearn"

# For search functionality
[outputs]
home = [ "HTML", "RSS", "JSON"]

Create your first chapter page

Chapters are pages that contain other child pages. It has a special layout style and usually just contains a chapter name, the title and a brief abstract of the section.

### Chapter 1

# Basics

Discover what this Hugo theme is all about and the core concepts behind it.

renders as

The Relearn theme provides archetypes to create skeletons for your website. Begin by creating your first chapter page with the following command

hugo new --kind chapter basics/_index.md

By opening the given file, you should see the property chapter=true on top, meaning this page is a chapter.

By default all chapters and pages are created as a draft. If you want to render these pages, remove the property draft: true from the metadata.

Create your first content pages

Then, create content pages inside the previously created chapter. Here are two ways to create content in the chapter:

hugo new basics/first-content.md
hugo new basics/second-content/_index.md

Feel free to edit those files by adding some sample content and replacing the title value in the beginning of the files.

Launching the website locally

Launch by using the following command:

hugo serve

Go to http://localhost:1313

You should notice three things:

1. You have a left-side Basics menu, containing two submenus with names equal to the title properties in the previously created files.
2. The home page explains how to customize it by following the instructions.
3. When you run hugo serve, when the contents of the files change, the page automatically refreshes with the changes. Neat!

Build the website

When your site is ready to deploy, run the following command:

hugo

A public folder will be generated, containing all static content and assets for your website. It can now be deployed on any web server.

Configuration

Global site parameters

On top of Hugo global configuration, the Relearn theme lets you define the following parameters in your config.toml (here, values are default).

Note that some of these parameters are explained in details in other sections of this documentation.

[params]
  # This controls whether submenus will be expanded (true), or collapsed (false) in the
  # menu; if no setting is given, the first menu level is set to false, all others to true;
  # this can be overridden in the pages frontmatter
  alwaysopen = true
  # Prefix URL to edit current page. Will display an "Edit" button on top right hand corner of every page.
  # Useful to give opportunity to people to create merge request for your doc.
  # See the config.toml file from this documentation site to have an example.
  editURL = ""
  # Author of the site, will be used in meta information
  author = ""
  # Description of the site, will be used in meta information
  description = ""
  # Shows a checkmark for visited pages on the menu
  showVisitedLinks = false
  # Disable search function. It will hide search bar
  disableSearch = false
  # Disable search in hidden pages, otherwise they will be shown in search box
  disableSearchHiddenPages = false
  # Disables hidden pages from showing up in the sitemap and on Google (et all), otherwise they may be indexed by search engines
  disableSeoHiddenPages = false
  # Disables hidden pages from showing up on the tags page although the tag term will be displayed even if all pages are hidden
  disableTagHiddenPages = false
  # Javascript and CSS cache are automatically busted when new version of site is generated.
  # Set this to true to disable this behavior (some proxies don't handle well this optimization)
  disableAssetsBusting = false
  # Set this to true to disable copy-to-clipboard button for inline code.
  disableInlineCopyToClipBoard = false
  # A title for shortcuts in menu is set by default. Set this to true to disable it.
  disableShortcutsTitle = false
  # If set to false, a Home button will appear below the search bar on the menu.
  # It is redirecting to the landing page of the current language if specified. (Default is "/")
  disableLandingPageButton = true
  # When using mulitlingual website, disable the switch language button.
  disableLanguageSwitchingButton = false
  # Hide breadcrumbs in the header and only show the current page title
  disableBreadcrumb = true
  # If set to true, hide table of contents menu in the header of all pages
  disableToc = false
  # If set to false, load the Mermaid module on every page regardless if a Mermaid shortcode or Mermaid codefence is present
  disableMermaid = false
  # Specifies the remote location of the Mermaid js
  customMermaidURL = "https://unpkg.com/mermaid/dist/mermaid.min.js"
  # Initialization parameter for Mermaid, see Mermaid documentation
  mermaidInitialize = "{ \"theme\": \"default\" }"
  # If set to false, load the Swagger module on every page regardless if a Swagger shortcode is present
  disableSwagger = false
  # Specifies the remote location of the RapiDoc js
  customSwaggerURL = ""https://unpkg.com/rapidoc/dist/rapidoc-min.js"
  # Initialization parameter for Swagger, see RapiDoc documentation
  swaggerInitialize = "{ \"theme\": \"light\" }"
  # Hide Next and Previous page buttons normally displayed full height beside content
  disableNextPrev = true
  # Order sections in menu by "weight" or "title". Default to "weight";
  # this can be overridden in the pages frontmatter
  ordersectionsby = "weight"
  # Change default color scheme with a variant one. Eg. can be "red", "blue", "green" or an array like [ "blue", "green" ].
  themeVariant = "relearn-light"
  # Change the title separator. Default to "::".
  titleSeparator = "-"
  # If set to true, the menu in the sidebar will be displayed in a collapsible tree view.
  collapsibleMenu = false
  # If a single page can contain content in multiple languages, add those here
  additionalContentLanguage = [ "en" ]

A word on running your site in a subfolder

The theme runs best if your site is installed in the root of your webserver. If your site is served from a subfolder, eg. https://example.com/mysite/, you have to set the following lines to your config.toml

baseURL = "https://example.com/mysite/"
canonifyURLs = true

Without canonifyURLs=true URLs in sublemental pages (like sitemap.xml, rss.xml) will be generated falsly while your HTML files will still work. See https://github.com/gohugoio/hugo/issues/5226.

Activate search

If not already present, add the follow lines in the same config.toml file.

[outputs]
  home = ["HTML", "RSS", "JSON"]

Relearn theme uses the last improvement available in hugo version 20+ to generate a json index file ready to be consumed by lunr.js javascript search engine.

Hugo generate lunrjs index.json at the root of public folder. When you build the site with hugo server, hugo generates it internally and of course it doesn’t show up in the filesystem

Activate print support

You can activate print support to add the capability to print whole chapters or even the complete site. Just add the PRINT output format to your home, section and page in your config.toml as seen below:

[outputs]
  home = ["HTML", "RSS", "PRINT", "JSON"]
  section = ["HTML", "RSS", "PRINT"]
  page = ["HTML", "RSS", "PRINT"]

This will add a little printer icon in the top bar. It will switch the page to print preview when clicked. You can then send this page to the printer by using your browser’s usual print functionality.

Mermaid

The Mermaid configuration parameters can also be set on a specific page. In this case, the global parameter would be overwritten by the local one. See Mermaid for additional documentation.

Example:

Mermaid is globally disabled. By default it won’t be loaded by any page. On page “Architecture” you need a class diagram. You can set the Mermaid parameters locally to only load mermaid on this page (not on the others).

You also can disable Mermaid for specific pages while globally enabled.

Home Button Configuration

If the disableLandingPageButton option is set to false, a Home button will appear on the left menu. It is an alternative for clicking on the logo. To edit the appearance, you will have to configure two parameters for the defined languages:

[Languages]
[Languages.en]
...
landingPageURL = "/"
landingPageName = "<i class='fas fa-home'></i> Home"
...
[Languages.pir]
...
landingPageURL = "/pir/"
landingPageName = "<i class='fas fa-home'></i> Arrr! Homme"
...

If those params are not configured for a specific language, they will get their default values:

landingPageURL = "/"
landingPageName = "<i class='fas fa-home'></i> Home"

The home button is going to look like this:

Customization

The Relearn theme has been built to be as configurable as possible by defining multiple partials

In themes/hugo-theme-relearn/layouts/partials/, you will find all the partials defined for this theme. If you need to overwrite something, don’t change the code directly. Instead follow this page. You’d create a new partial in the layouts/partials folder of your local project. This partial will have the priority.

This theme defines the following partials :

• header.html: the header of the page. Not meant to be overwritten
• footer.html: the footer of the page.Not meant to be overwritten
• menu.html: left menu. Not meant to be overwritten
• search.html: search box. Not meant to be overwritten
• custom-header.html: custom headers in page. Meant to be overwritten when adding CSS imports. Don’t forget to include style HTML tag directive in your file.
• custom-footer.html: custom footer in page. Meant to be overwritten when adding Javacript. Don’t forget to include javascript HTML tag directive in your file.
• favicon.html: the favicon
• logo.html: the logo, on top left hand corner
• meta.html: HTML meta tags, if you want to change default behavior
• menu-pre.html: side-wide configuration to prepend to menu items. If you override this, it is your responsiblity to take the page’s pre setting into account.
• menu-post.html: side-wide configuration to append to menu items. If you override this, it is your responsiblity to take the page’s post setting into account.
• menu-footer.html: footer of the the left menu
• toc.html: table of contents
• content.html: the content page itself. This can be overridden if you wan’t to display page’s meta data above or below the content.
• content-footer: footer below the content, has a default implementation but you can overwrite it if you don’t like it.

Change the logo

Create a new file in layouts/partials/ named logo.html. Then write any HTML you want. You could use an img HTML tag and reference an image created under the static folder, or you could paste a SVG definition!

Change the favicon

If your favicon is a SVG, PNG or ICO, just drop off your image in your local static/images/ folder and name it favicon.svg, favicon.png or favicon.ico respectivly.

If no favicon file is found, the theme will lookup the alternative filename logo in the same location and will repeat the search for the list of supported file types.

If you need to change this default behavior, create a new file in layouts/partials/ named favicon.html. Then write something like this:

<link rel="icon" href="/images/favicon.bmp" type="image/bmp" />

Change the colors

The Relearn theme lets you choose between some predefined color variants in light or dark mode, but feel free to add one yourself!

You can preview the shipped variants by changing them in the variant selector at the bottom of the menu.

Single variant

Set the themeVariant value with the name of your theme file. That’s it!

[params]
  themeVariant = "relearn-light"

In the above exaple your theme file has to be named theme-relearn-light.css

Multiple variants

You can also set multiple variants. In this case, the first variant is the default choosen on first view and a variant switch will be shown in the menu footer.

[params]
  # Change default color scheme with a variant one.
  themeVariant = [ "relearn-light", "relearn-dark" ]

Roll your own

If you are not happy with the shipped variants you can either copy one of the shipped files, edit them in a text editor and configure the themeVariant parameter in your config.toml or just use the interactive variant generator.

Stylesheet generator

This interactive tool may help you to generate your own color variant stylesheet.

To get started, first select a color variant from the variant switch that fits you best as a starting point.

The graph is interactive and reflect the current colors. You can click on any of the colored boxes to adjust the respective color. The graph and the page will update accordingly.

The arrowed lines reflects how colors are inherited thru different parts of the theme if the descendent isn’t overwritten. If you want to delete a color and let it inherit from its parent, just delete the value from the input field.

To better understand this select the neon variant and modify the differnet heading colors. There, colors for the heading h2, h3 and h4 are explicitly set. h5 is not set and inherits its value from h4. h6 is also not set and inherits its value from h5.

Once you’ve changed a color, the variant switch will show a “My custom variant” entry and your changes are stored in the browser. You can change pages and even close the browser without losing your changes.

Once you are satisfied, you can download the new variants file and install it in your site.

Variant generator

Download variant Reset variant

Download variant Reset variant

History