What's New

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

0.95.0 The minimum required Hugo version.

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

Change A change in default behavior that may requires action by you if you want to revert it.

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

5.14.0 (2023-05-18)

• New The taxonomy pages received some love in this release, making them better leverage available screen space and adding translation support for the taxonomy names.

  Hugo’s default taxonmies tags and categories are already contained in the theme’s i18n files. If you have self-defined taxonomies, you can add translations by adding them to your own i18n files. If you don’t provide translations, the singualar and plural forms are taken as configured in your config.toml.

• New The new parameter breadcrumbSeparator is now available in your config.toml to change the - well - separator of the breadcrumb items. An appropriate default is in place if you do not configure anything.

• New To give you more flexibility in customizing your article layout a new partial content-header.html is introduced.

  This came out of the requirement to customize the position of article tags, which by default is displayed above the title. A second requirement was to also show additional taxonomies not supported by the theme nativly. While Hugo supports tags and categories by default, the theme only displays tags.

  So how does it work starting from the theme’s default where tags are only shown above the title?

  1. Hide tags above title: Overwrite content-header.html with an empty file.
  2. Show tags below title: Overwrite heading-post.html and add {{- partial "tags.html" . }} to it.
  3. Show tags below article: Overwrite content-footer.html and add {{- partial "tags.html" . }} to it.

5.13.0 (2023-05-17)

• Change The swagger shortcode was deprecated in favor for the openapi shortcode. You don’t need to change anything yet as the old name will be used as a fallback. It is planned to remove the swagger shortcode in the next major release.

  Additionally, the implemantion of this shortcode was switched from RapiDoc to SwaggerUI.

5.12.0 (2023-05-04)

• Change In the effort to comply with WCAG standards, the implementation of the collapsible menu was changed (again). While Internet Explorer 11 has issues in displaying it, the functionality still works.

• New Support for the great VSCode Front Matter extension which provides on-premise CMS capabilties to Hugo.

  The theme provides Front Matter snippets for its shortcodes. Currently only English and German is supported. Put a reference into your frontmatter.json like this

  {
    ...
    "frontMatter.extends": [
        "./vscode-frontmatter/snippets.en.json"
    ]
    ...
  }
  

• New Support for languages that are written right to left (like Arabic) is now complete and extended to the menu, the top navigation bar and print. You can experience this in the pirate translation. This feature is not available in Internet Explorer 11.

• New The scrollbars are now colored according to their variant color scheme to better fit into the visuals.

5.11.0 (2023-02-07)

• Change The theme removed the popular jQuery library from its distribution.

  In case you made changes to the theme that are dependend on this library you can place a copy of jQuery into your static/js directory and load it from your own layouts/partials/custom-header.html like this:

  <script src="{{"js/jquery.min.js"| relURL}}" defer></script>
  

• Change Mermaid diagrams can now be configured for pan and zoom on site-, page-level or individually for each graph.

  The default setting of on, in effect since 1.1.0, changed back to off as there was interference with scrolling on mobile and big pages.

• Change The theme is now capable to visually adapt to your OS’s light/dark mode setting.

  This is also the new default setting if you haven’t configured themeVariant in your config.toml.

  Additionally you can configure the variants to be taken for light/dark mode with the new themeVariantAuto parameter.

  This is not supported for Internet Explorer 11, which still displays in the relearn-light variant.

• Change The JavaScript code for handling image lightboxes (provided by Featherlight) was replaced by a CSS-only solution.

  This also changed the lightbox effects parameter from featherlight=false to lightbox=false. Nevertheless you don’t need to change anything as the old name will be used as a fallback.

• Change In the effort to comply with WCAG standards, the implementation of the expand shortcode was changed. While Internet Explorer 11 has issues in displaying it, the functionality still works.

• New Translation for Czech. This language is not supported for search.

• New GitHub releases are also now tagged for the main version (eg. 1.2.x), major version (eg. 1.x) and the latest (just x) release making it easier for you to pin the theme to a certain version.

5.10.0 (2023-01-25)

• New The attachments, badge, button and notice shortcodes have a new parameter color to set arbitrary CSS color values.

  Additionally the --ACCENT-color brand color introduced in version 5.8.0 is now supported with these shortcodes.

5.9.0 (2022-12-23)

• Breaking With this version it is now possible to not only have sections on the first menu level but also pages.

  It was later discovered, that this causes pages only meant to be displayed in the More section of the menu and stored directly inside your content directory to now show up in the menu aswell.

  To get rid of this undesired behavior you have two choices:

  1. Make the page file for the More section a headless branch bundle (contained in its own subdirectory and called _index.md) and add the following frontmatter configuration to the file (see exampleSite’s content/showcase). This causes its content to not be contained in the sitemap.

     [_build]
       render = "never"
       list = "never"
       publishResources = false
     

  2. Store the page file for the More section below a parent headless branch bundle and add the following frontmatter to the parent. In this case, the file itself can be a branch bundle, leaf bundle or simple page (see exampleSite’s content/more/ and content/more/credits). This causes its content to be contained in the sitemap.

     [_build]
       render = "always"
       list = "never"
       publishResources = true
     

• Change The required folder name for the attachments shortcode was changed for leaf bundles.

  Previously, the attachments for leaf bundles in non-multilang setups were required to be in a files subdirectory. For page bundles and leaf bundles in multilang setups they were always required to be in a _index.<LANGCODE>.files or index.<LANGCODE>.files subdirectory accordingly.

  This added unnessessary complexity. So attachments for leaf bundles in non-multilang setups can now also reside in a index.files directory. Although the old files directory is now deprecated, if both directories are present, only the old files directory will be used for compatiblity.

• Change Absolute links prefixed with http:// or https:// are now opened in a separate browser tab.

  You can revert back to the old behavior by defining externalLinkTarget="_self" in the params section of your config.toml.

• New The theme now supports Hugo’s module system.

5.8.0 (2022-12-08)

• New The new badge shortcode is now available to add highly configurable markers to your content as you can see it on this page.

• New The new icon shortcode simplyfies the usage of icons. This can even be combined with also new badge shortcode.

• New The theme now supports some of GFM (GitHub Flavored Markdown) syntax and Hugo Markdown extensions, namely task lists, defintion lists and footnotes.

• New A new color --ACCENT-color was introduced which is used for highlightning search results on the page. In case you simply don’t care, you don’t need to change anything in your variant stylesheet as the old yellow color is still used as default.

5.7.0 (2022-11-29)

• Change The Korean language translation for this theme is now available with the language code ko. Formerly the country code kr was used instead.

• New The button shortcode can now also be used as a real button inside of HTML forms - although this is a pretty rare use case. The documentation was updated accordingly.

• New The search now supports the Korean language.

5.6.0 (2022-11-18)

• New This release introduces an additional dedicated search page. On this page, displayed search results have more space making it easier scanning thru large number of results.

  To activate this feature, you need to configure it in your config.toml as a new outputformat SEARCHPAGE for the home page. If you don’t configure it, no dedicated search page will be accessible and the theme works as before.

  You can access the search page by either clicking on the magnifier glass or pressing enter inside of the search box.

• New Keyboard handling for the TOC and search was improved.

  Pressing CTRL+ALT+t now will not only toggle the TOC overlay but also places the focus to the first heading on opening. Subsequently this makes it possible to easily select headings by using the TAB key.

  The search received its own brand new keyboard shortcut CTRL+ALT+f. This will focus the cursor inside of the the search box so you can immediately start your search by typing.

• New You are now able to turn off the generation of generator meta tags in your HTML head to hide the used versions of Hugo and this theme.

  To configure this in your config.toml make sure to set Hugo’s disableHugoGeneratorInject=true and also [params] disableGeneratorVersion=true, otherwise Hugo will generate a meta tag into your home page automagically.

• New Creation of your project gets a little bit faster with this release.

  This addresses increased build time with the 5.x releases. The theme now heavily caches partial results leading to improved performance. To further increase performance, unnecessary parts of the page are now skipped for creation of the print output (eg. menus, navigation bar, etc.).

5.5.0 (2022-11-06)

• Change The way images are processed has changed. Now images are lazy loaded by default which speeds up page load on slow networks and/or big pages and also the print preview.

  For that the JavaScript code to handle the lightbox and image effects on the client side was removed in favour for static generation of those effects on the server.

  If you have used HTML directly in your Markdown files, this now has the downside that it doesn’t respect the effect query parameter anymore. In this case you have to migrate all your HTML img URLs manually to the respective HTML attributes.

  Old	New
  <img src="pic.png?width=20vw&classes=shadow,border">	<img src="pic.png" style="width:20vw;" class="shadow border">

5.4.0 (2022-11-01)

• Change With the proper settings in your config.toml your page is now servable from the local file system using file:// URLs.

  Please note that the searchbox will only work for this if you reconfigure your outputformat for the homepage in your config.toml from JSON to SEARCH. The now deprecated JSON outputformat still works as before, so there is no need to reconfigure your installation if it is only served from http:// or https://.

• Change The button shortcode has a new parameter target to set the destination frame/window for the URL to open. If not given, it defaults to a new window/tab for external URLs or is not set at all for internal URLs. Previously even internal URLs where opened in a new window/tab.

• New The math shortcode and mermaid shortcode now also support the align parameter if codefence syntax is used.

• New Support for languages that are written right to left (like Arabic). This is only implemented for the content area but not the navigation sidebar. This feature is not available in Internet Explorer 11.

• New Translation for Finnish (Suomi).

5.3.0 (2022-10-07)

• Change In the effort to comply with WCAG standards, the implementation of the collapsible menu was changed. The functionality of the new implementation does not work with old browsers (Internet Explorer 11).

• New Image formatting has two new classes to align images to the left or right. Additionally, the already existing inline option is now documented.

• New Printing for the swagger shortcode was optimized to expand sections that are usually closed in interactive mode. This requires print support to be configured.

5.2.0 (2022-08-03)

• Change If you’ve set collapsibleMenu = true in your config.toml, the menu will be expanded if a search term is found in a collapsed submenu. The menu will return to its initial collapse state once the search term does not match any submenus.

5.1.0 (2022-07-15)

• 0.95.0 This release requires a newer Hugo version.

• Change Because the print preview URLs were non deterministic for normal pages in comparison to page bundles, this is now changed. Each print preview is now accessible by adding a index.print.html to the default URL.

  You can revert this behavior by overwriting the PRINT output format setting in your config.tomlto:

  [outputFormats]
    [outputFormats.PRINT]
      name= "PRINT"
      baseName = "index"
      path = "_print"
      isHTML = true
      mediaType = 'text/html'
      permalinkable = false
  

5.0.0 (2022-07-05)

• Breaking The theme changed how JavaScript and CSS dependencies are loaded to provide a better performance. In case you’ve added own JavaScript code that depends on the themes jQuery implementation, you have to put it into a separate *.js file (if not already) and add the defer keyword to the script element. Eg.

  <script defer src="myscript.js"></script>
  

• Change The way archetypes are used to generate output has changed. The new systems allows you, to redefine existing archetypes or even generate your own ones.

  Your existing markdown files will still work like before and therefore you don’t need to change anything after the upgrade. Nevertheless, it is recommended to adapt your existing markdown files to the new way as follows:

  • for your home page, add the frontmatter parameter archetype = "home" and remove the leading heading

  • for all files containing the deprecated frontmatter parameter chapter = true, replace it with archetype = "chapter" and remove the leading headings

• Change The frontmatter options pre / post were renamed to menuPre / menuPost. The old options will still be used if the new options aren’t set. Therefore you don’t need to change anything after the upgrade.

• New Adding new partials heading-pre.html / heading-post.html and according frontmatter options headingPre / headingPost to modify the way your page`s main heading gets styled.

• New The new shortcode math is available to add beautiful math and chemical formulae. See the documentation for available features. This feature will not work with Internet Explorer 11.

4.2.0 (2022-06-23)

• 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 achieve 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.

• Change The landingPageURL was removed from config.toml. You can safely remove this as well from your configuration as it is not used anymore. The theme will detect the landing page URL automatically.

• 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 (2022-06-12)

• 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 (2022-06-05)

• 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 complexity 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 respectively.

• 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 Translation for Polish. This language is not supported for search.

• New The documentation for all shortcodes were revised.

3.4.0 (2022-04-03)

• 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 (2022-03-28)

• New Introduction of new CSS variables to set the font. The theme distinguishes 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 (2022-03-19)

• 0.93.0 This release requires a newer Hugo version.

• 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.

• 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 (2022-03-15)

• 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 (2022-02-22)

• 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 appropriate 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 (2021-11-19)

• 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 compliant and exchanging this theme in your project to some other theme will be effortless.

  In a standard compliant 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 compliant 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 (2021-11-03)

• 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 (2021-10-24)

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

2.6.0 (2021-10-21)

• 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 (2021-10-08)

• Change New colors --CODE-BLOCK-color and --CODE-BLOCK-BG-color were added to provide a fallback for Hugos syntax highlighting 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 (2021-10-07)

• 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 (2021-09-13)

• 0.81.0 This release requires a newer Hugo version.

• New Showcase multilanguage features by providing 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 (2021-09-09)

• 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 (2021-09-07)

• 0.69.0 This release requires a newer Hugo version.

• Change In case the site’s structure contains additional *.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 (2021-08-28)

• Change Syntax highlighting 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 (2021-07-26)

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

1.1.0 (2021-07-02)

• Breaking Mermaid diagrams can now be panned and zoomed. This isn’t configurable yet.

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

1.0.0 (2021-07-01)

• 0.65.0 The requirement for the Hugo version of this theme is the same as for the Learn theme version 2.5.0 on 2021-07-01.

• 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 at least version 0.95.0 of the Hugo binary for your OS (Windows, Linux, Mac).

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 using Hugo’s module system.

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

From Git

If you install the theme from your git repository or GitHub, you have several options.

If you use the head of the main branch, you are using the development version. Usually it is fully functional but can break from time to time. We try to fix newly introduced bugs in this version as soon as possible.

Additionally you can checkout one of the tagged versions. These tagged versions correspond to an official releases from the GitHub repository.

Besides the usual version tags (eg 1.2.3) there are also tags for the main version (eg. 1.2.x), major version (eg. 1.x) and the latest (just x) released version making it easier for you to pin the theme to a certain version.

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", "SEARCH"]

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 if you want to disable generation for generator version meta tags of hugo and the theme;
  # don't forget to also set Hugo's disableHugoGeneratorInject=true, otherwise it will generate a meta tag into your home page
  disableGeneratorVersion = 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 MathJax module on every page regardless if a MathJax shortcode is present
  disableMathJax = false
  # Specifies the remote location of the MathJax js
  customMathJaxURL = "https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/npm/mathjax@3/es5/tex-mml-chtml.js"
  # Initialization parameter for MathJax, see MathJax documentation
  mathJaxInitialize = "{}"
  # 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 OpenAPI module on every page regardless if a OpenAPI shortcode is present
  disableOpenapi = false
  # Specifies the remote location of the swagger-ui js
  customOpenapiURL = "https://unpkg.com/swagger-ui-dist/swagger-ui-bundle.js"
  # 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 "auto", "red", "blue", "green" or an array like [ "blue", "green" ].
  themeVariant = "auto"
  # Change the breadcrumb separator. Default to ">".
  breadcrumbSeparator = "|"
  # Change the title separator. Default to "::".
  titleSeparator = "-"
  # 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 a single page can contain content in multiple languages, add those here
  additionalContentLanguage = [ "en" ]
  # If set to true, no index.html will be appended to prettyURLs; this will cause pages not
  # to be servable from the file system
  disableExplicitIndexURLs = false
  # For external links you can define how they are opened in your browser; this setting will only be applied to the content area but not the shortcut menu
  externalLinkTarget = "_blank"

Serving your page from a subfolder

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
relativeURLs = 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.

Serving your page from the filesystem

If you want your page served from the filesystem by using URLs starting with file:// you’ll need the following configuration in your config.toml:

relativeURLs = true

The theme will append an additional index.html to all branch bundle links by default to make the page be servable from the file system. If you don’t care about the file system and only serve your page via a webserver you can also generate the links without this change by adding this to your config.toml

[params]
  disableExplicitIndexURLs = true

Activate search

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

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

This will generate a search index file at the root of your public folder ready to be consumed by the Lunr search library. Note that the SEARCH outputformat was named JSON in previous releases but was implemented differently. Although JSON still works, it is now deprecated.

Activate dedicated search page

You can add a dedicated search page for your page by adding the SEARCHPAGE outputformat to your home page by adding the following lines in your config.toml file.

[outputs]
  home = ["HTML", "RSS", "SEARCH", "SEARCHPAGE"]

You can access this page by either clicking on the magnifier glass or by typing some search term and pressing ENTER inside of the menu’s search box .

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", "SEARCH"]
  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.

MathJax

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

Example

MathJax is globally disabled. By default it won’t be loaded by any page.

On page “Physics” you coded some JavaScript for a dynamic formulae. You can set the MathJax parameters locally to load mathJax on this page.

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

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 coded some JavaScript to dynamically generate a class diagram. You can set the Mermaid parameters locally to load mermaid on this page.

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]
...
[languages.en.params]
landingPageName = "<i class='fas fa-home'></i> Home"
...
[languages.pir]
...
[languages.pir.params]
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:

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. See output-formats
• footer.html: the footer of the page. See output-formats
• body.html: the body of the page. The body may contain of one or many articles. See output-formats
• article.html: the output for a single article, can contain elements around your content. See output-formats
• 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 JavaScript. Don’t forget to include javascript HTML tag directive in your file.
• favicon.html: the favicon
• heading-pre.html: side-wide configuration to prepend to pages title headings. If you override this, it is your responsibility to take the page’s headingPre setting into account.
• heading-post.html: side-wide configuration to append to pages title headings. If you override this, it is your responsibility to take the page’s headingPost setting into account.
• 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 responsibility to take the page’s menuPre setting into account.
• menu-post.html: side-wide configuration to append to menu items. If you override this, it is your responsibility to take the page’s menuPost 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 want to display page’s meta data above or below the content.
• content-header.html: header above the title, has a default implementation but you can overwrite it if you don’t like it.
• content-footer.html: 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 respectively.

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 example 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 chosen 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" ]

Adjust to OS Settings

You can also cause the site to adjust to your OS settings for light/dark mode. Just set the themeVariant to auto. That’s it.

If you’ve set multiple variants, you can drop auto at any position, but usually it makes sense to set it in the first position and make it the default.

[params]
  themeVariant = [ "auto", "red" ]

If you don’t configure anything else, the theme will use relearn-light for light mode and relearn-dark for dark mode.

If you don’t like that, you can set themeVariantAuto. The first element is the variant for light mode, the second for dark mode

[params]
  themeVariantAuto = [ "learn", "neon" ]

Roll your own

If you are not happy with the shipped variants you can either copy and rename one of the shipped files from themes/hugo-theme-relearn/static/css to static/css, edit them afterwards to your liking in a text editor and configure the themeVariant parameter in your config.toml or just use the interactive variant generator.

Output formats

Certain parts of the theme can be changed for support of your own output formats. Eg. if you define a new output format PLAINTEXT in your config.toml, you can add a file layouts/partials/header.plaintext.html to change the way, the page header should look like for that output format.

Stylesheet generator

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

Download variant Reset variant

Download variant Reset variant

History