Content Management

This article covers everything related to the content directory.

Archetypes

Archetypes are the default content Hugo uses when you run hugo new content to create a new post. They support functions and methods, for example:

---
date: '{{ .Date }}'
title: '{{ .File.ContentBaseName }}'
---

... more

Just place the file at archetypes/default.md. You can also set different defaults for different page types. See the Archetypes documentation for details.

Cascade

Cascade lets you set values for every piece of content under a given path at once, so you don't have to configure each file individually. You can set cascade in hugo.yaml, or in front matter.

Referencing Posts and Images

See Content Authoring.

Shortcode

See Content Authoring.

Summary and Description

In Hugo, the difference is that Summary can be generated automatically from the start of a post and supports HTML, while Description is entered manually in front matter and only supports plain strings. How a site actually uses these two fields depends entirely on the theme, not on Hugo itself.

Automatic Summary generation can be controlled through summaryLength, and preserves <p> tags rather than cutting through them. You can also truncate a summary manually in Markdown with <!--more-->, but be careful not to leave any space around it.

Math

Hugo supports rendering math through its passthrough render hook combined with the KaTeX engine, but how each theme actually implements math rendering varies. Check your theme's documentation for details.

Syntax Highlighting

Hugo handles syntax highlighting with Chroma, which offers a range of styles to choose from. Since syntax highlighting comes down to CSS, Hugo has no visibility into how a given theme implements it. Check your theme's documentation for the specific setup.

Markdown Attributes

Markdown attributes are a Markdown extension that let you attach HTML attributes to a target element for finer control. You need to enable this feature in your configuration file:

markup:
  goldmark:
    parser:
      attribute:
        block: true
        title: true

If your theme uses a custom render hook, that render hook needs to implement Markdown attributes correctly as well. Here's the syntax for each element:

Heading

## H1{class="foo"}

Paragraph

A Markdown paragraph.
{class="foo"}

Table

| A | B |
| - | - |
| x | y |
{class="foo"}

Code block

```sh {class="foo"}
echo "Hello World"
```

Image

![foo](foo.jpg)
{class="foo"}

Taxonomies

Hugo supports content classification built around taxonomy and term:

• taxonomy represents a classification scheme, such as /tags/, which represents the tags scheme
• term represents each key within that scheme; in /tags/my-tag/, my-tag is a term under tags

Set this in front matter as follows:

---
title: Foo
tags:
  - Tag A
  - Tag B
---

Hugo lets you define additional taxonomies by setting the taxonomies field in hugo.yaml:

taxonomies:
  category: categories
  tag: tags
  author: authors
  film: films

Name each taxonomy using the singular = plural format.

Authors

How authors are implemented depends entirely on the theme. Check your theme's documentation for details.

Hugo recommends treating authors as a taxonomy. This makes it painless to scale to multiple authors later, and fits naturally with how Hugo organizes content. See the multi-author example for a working setup.

Related Content

For a typical blog, how related posts get selected largely comes down to whether two posts share the same taxonomies; other factors are hard to control directly. Beyond taxonomies, the only thing you can adjust as a user is the weight of different fields in your configuration.

See How related content works for details.

Logical Path

A logical path represents where a piece of content sits within the content directory. It's how Hugo understands the structure of that directory. For example, given this structure:

content/
└── movies/
    ├── m1/
    │   └── index.md
    └── m2.md

Hugo resolves these to the logical paths /movies/m1 and /movies/m2, respectively.

A logical path isn't limited to files that physically exist under content. Hugo also assigns logical paths to automatically generated pages, such as taxonomy and term pages.

As a user, you'll mainly use logical paths when configuring hugo.yaml, for example setting pageRef in a menu configuration to a logical path so Hugo can resolve the corresponding page and call related methods on it. For instance, HasMenuCurrent can check whether the current page falls under that menu item.

As a developer, most path-related methods work with logical paths.

Multilingual Sites

See Multilingual Sites.