Hugo Still Rules

I manage this site with the help from Hugo, a static site generator written in Go. And since I wrote about it some months ago, there have been big improvements.

The list below was my “do not like” list back then:

• The error messages could be more informative. I have been on a few goose-chases chasing rendering-issues, only to realize I was missing some bracket in a shortcode in some file.
• The template-support could be better, It’s currently a little bit like PHP-include; no decorator- or inheritance-constructions, which make for some not very well-formed templates. And the Go-templates have some scoping issues that is a little hard to wrap my head around. But I notice support for other template-engines are on its way.
• There are themes support and there are themes. But most of those I have looked at looks kind of … not fantastic pretty. And you have to run the theme to see how it looks. But Hugo is still young, I’m shure this is coming.
• Some obvious key-features are still missing; like some proper pagination-support (there are currently some basic support for back and next).
• Related to the above: Hugo is open source, but still looks much like a one-man project – and the one man being Steve Francia. There are some contributions tickling in from others, but not many. Maybe the ongoing license-change from SimPL-2.0 to the more widely used Apache 2 will help. Several people, including people inside Google, have said that this could be a major brake, pulling back on getting people to share their work.
  
• As this is Go with its static linking, extending Hugo = recompiling Hugo. No obvious plugin support.
• It’s static, so creating dynamic stuff isn’t as obvious as in the WordPress-world. But there’s no one stopping you from talking to backends with JavaScript, and I guess that’s how many (most?) sites are built today. And shortcodes make it easy to embed external services into your pages, like galleries and videos.

I wrote the above on Hugo version 0.12. The current is written on Hugo 0.14-DEV, the compiled version from the latest source. And I marked by strike-through the items on my list that have been solved since then. The error messages are greatly improved, with filename in the error text – and even line numbers in some cases. As to template decorators, Hugo now supports Ace templates’ base and inner templates, which is golden. And a new Scratch thing is added to work around some of the scoping quirks. The “proper pagination support” is in place. Looking at the commit log on GitHub, it is a pretty active project, but still a few-men project.

So what is missing now? Not sure. A quality “related posts” feature would be cool. And in my case it would have to look at the prose written. I’m to lazy to properly tag my content.

The theme support has improved, but could be better. Hugo really needs a better way to show-off all the themes.