1.7 Other themes | blogdown: Creating Websites with R Markdown

In Hugo, themes control the entire appearance and functionality of your site. A Hugo theme is made with the following elements:

Layout files, located for example in themes/hugo-lithium/layouts/ . Hugo is a templating system, so layout files are *.html files, with a specific file and naming structure. Read more about these files in Section 2.5 .

Configuration files. This may be a single config.yaml or config.toml file in the root of your website project. Some themes also use a configuration directory, located in config/_default/ . Read more about these files in Chapter 2.2 .

All of these files are contained in the themes/ folder, and are kept separate from your website content/. However, all Hugo themes rely on specific content/ and YAML frontmatter, so do not be fooled into thinking that themes and content are not dependent on each other—they are! In this section, we provide some opinionated advice on choosing themes, as well as recommended workflows for working with Hugo themes using blogdown.

1.7.1

Choosing themes

If you care a lot about the appearance of your website, you will probably spend quite a bit of time in the beginning looking for a Hugo theme that you like from the collection listed at https://themes.gohugo.io. Please note that not all themes have been tested with blogdown. If you find a certain theme does not work well with blogdown, you may report to https://github.com/rstudio/blogdown/issues, and we will try to investigate the reason, but it can be time-consuming to learn and understand how a new theme works, so we recommend that you learn more about Hugo by yourself before asking, and we also encourage users to help each other there.

There are now about 400 Hugo themes to choose from. To save you some time, we list a few themes below that match our taste:

Simple/minimal themes: XMin, Tanka,
Cupper,
simple-a, and ghostwriter.
Sophisticated themes: Jane, Tranquilpeak,
Creative portfolio, and Universal.
Multimedia content themes: If you are interested in adding multimedia content to your site (such as audio files of a podcast), the castanet theme provides an excellent framework tailored for this application. An example of a site using blogdown with the castanet theme is the R-Podcast.

If you do not understand HTML, CSS, or JavaScript, and have no experience with Hugo themes or templates, it may take you about 10 minutes to get started with your new website, since you have to accept everything you are given (such as the default theme); if you do have the knowledge and experience (and desire to highly customize your site), it may take you several days to get started. Hugo is really powerful. Be cautious with power.

Another thing to keep in mind is that the more effort you make in a complicated theme, the more difficult it is to switch to other themes in the future, because you may have customized a lot of things that are not straightforward to port to another theme. So please ask yourself seriously, “Do I like this fancy theme so much that I will definitely not change it in the next couple of years?”