Getting started with the Academic theme for Hugo

20. Apr 2016 academic, hugo

The Academic theme enables you to easily create a personal academic website using the Hugo static site generator.

Key features:

Designed for academic staff, students, or general personal use
Includes Biography, Publications, Projects, News/Blog, Teaching, and Contact sections
Write in Markdown for easy formatting and code highlighting, with LaTeX for mathematical expressions
Academic linking (Scholar etc.), Google Analytics, and Disqus comments
Responsive and mobile friendly
Simple and refreshing one page design
Easy to customize

Installation

Install Hugo and create a new website:
```
hugo new site my_website
cd my_website
```
Install Academic theme with git:
```
git clone https://github.com/gcushen/hugo-academic.git themes/academic
```
Or alternatively, download Academic and extract it into a themes/academic folder within your Hugo website.
If you are creating a new website, copy the contents of the exampleSite folder to your website root folder, overwriting existing files if necessary. The exampleSite folder contains an example config file and content to help you get started.
```
cp -av themes/academic/exampleSite/* .
```
Start the Hugo server from your website root folder:
```
hugo server --watch
```
Now you can go to localhost:1313 and your new Academic themed website should appear.
Customize your website (see next section), build it by running hugo, and deploy it by copying the public/ directory (by FTP, Rsync, git push, etc.) to your production web server.

Getting Started

Assuming you created a new website with the example content following the installation steps above, this section explores just a few more steps in order to customize it.

The core parameters for the website can be edited in the config.toml configuration file.

As can be seen in the example config.toml, the social/academic networking icons are defined as multiples of [[params.social]]. They can be duplicated or deleted as necessary.

By default, publications will be displayed in a simple list. If you prefer a more detailed list with abstract and image, you can enable the detailed publication list on the homepage by setting detailed_list = true in content/home/publications.md.

For deployment, the baseURL variable should be changed to match your website URL such as baseURL = "http://your-site.org/". The example Disqus commenting variable should be cleared (e.g. disqusShortname = "") or set to your own Disqus shortname to enable commenting. To enable Google Analytics, add your tracking code in config.toml similarly to googleAnalytics = "UA-12345678-9".

Next, you may be interested to read the guide about managing content, or continue reading below for advanced customization tips and instructions for keeping the theme up-to-date with any improvements that become available.

Advanced customization

It is possible to carry out many customizations without touching any files in themes/academic, making it easier to upgrade the theme in the future.

Custom theme color (CSS) or JavaScript (JS)

You can link custom CSS and JS assets (relative to your root static/css and static/js respectively) from your config.toml using custom_css = ["custom.css"] or custom_js = ["custom.js"].

For example, lets make a green theme. First, define custom_css = ["green.css"] in config.toml. Then we can download the example green theme and save it as static/css/green.css, relative to your website root (i.e. not in the themes directory).

Permalinks

Permalinks, or permanent links, are URLs to individual pages and posts on your website. They are permanent web addresses which can be used to link to your content. Using Hugo’s permalinks option these can be easily customized. For example, the blog post URL can be changed to the form yourURL/2016/05/01/my-post-slug by adding the following near the top of your config.toml (before [params] settings):

[permalinks]
    post = "/:year/:month/:day/:slug"

Where :slug defaults to the filename of the post, excluding the file extension. However, slug may be overridden on a per post basis if desired, simply by setting slug = "my-short-post-title" in your post preamble.

Upgrading

Feel free to star the project on Github and monitor the commits for updates.

Before upgrading the theme, it is recommended to make a backup of your entire website directory, or at least your themes/academic directory. You can also read about the most recent milestones (but this doesn’t necessarily reflect the latest master release).

Before upgrading for the first time, the remote origin repository should be renamed to upstream:

$ cd themes/academic
$ git remote rename origin upstream

To list available updates:

$ cd themes/academic
$ git fetch upstream
$ git log --pretty=oneline --abbrev-commit --decorate HEAD..upstream/master

Then, upgrade by running:

$ git pull upstream

If you have modified files in themes/academic, git will attempt to auto-merge changes. If conflicts are reported, you will need to manually edit the files with conflicts and add them back (git add <filename>).

If there are any issues after upgrading, you may wish to compare your site with the latest example site to check if any settings changed.

Contributing

Please use the issue tracker to let me know about any bugs or feature requests, or alternatively make a pull request.

License

Released under the MIT license.