Congo

Congo is designed to be a fast, lightweight theme for Hugo. It's based upon Tailwind CSS with a clean and minimalist design.

Features

• Built with Tailwind CSS JIT for minified stylesheets without any excess code
• Theme can be easily edited using simple Tailwind colour definitions and styles
• Dark mode support (auto-switching based upon browser)
• Highly customisable configuration
• Flexible with any content types, taxonomies and menus
• Diagrams and visualisations using MermaidJS
• SVG social icons from FontAwesome 5
• SEO friendly
• Fathom Analytics and Google Analytics
• Favicons support - Generate using favicon.io
• Comments support

Installation

Simply follow the standard Hugo Quick Start procedure to get up and running quickly.

Detailed instructions can be found below.

1. Install Hugo

You can find specific instructions for your platform in the official Hugo docs.

Make sure you are using Hugo version 0.86.1 or later as the theme takes advantage of some of the latest Hugo features.

2. Create a new site

Run the command hugo new site mywebsite to create a new Hugo site in a folder named mywebsite.

3. Download the Congo theme

There are a couple of ways to install the Congo theme into your Hugo website. The git method is the easiest to keep the theme up-to-date, but you can also download and install manually if you don't have git available.

Install using git

Change into the directory for your Hugo website, initialise a new repository and add Congo as a submodule.

cd mywebsite
git init
git submodule add https://github.com/jpanther/Congo.git themes/congo

Note: You need to substitute mywebsite for the correct folder name you used in Step 2.

Install manually

Download the latest version of the theme from: https://github.com/jpanther/Congo/archive/stable.zip

Extract the archive and you should have a folder named Congo-stable.

Rename the folder to congo and move it to the themes/ directory inside your mywebsite folder.

Note: You need to substitute mywebsite for the correct folder name you used in Step 2.

4. Set up your configuration files

In the root folder of your website, delete the config.toml file that was generated by Hugo. Copy the entire themes/congo/config/ folder into the root of your website. This will ensure you have all the correct theme settings and will enable you to easily customise the theme.

You're now all set up to use Congo. From here you can add some content and start the Hugo server.

Refer to the Hugo docs for more information or read the next section to learn more about configuring the theme.

Configuration

Congo is a highly customisable theme and uses some of the latest Hugo features to simplify how it is configured.

The theme ships with a default configuration that gets you up and running with a basic blog or static website. This default configuration can be found in the themes/congo/config/_default/ folder.

Configuration files bundled with the theme are provided in TOML format as this is the default Hugo syntax. Feel free to convert your config to YAML or JSON as you wish.

The default theme configuration is documented in each file so you can freely adjust the settings to meet your needs.

Getting started

The config files that ship with Congo contain all of the possible settings that the theme recognises. By default, many of these are commented out but you can simply uncomment them to activate or change a specific feature.

A few things you need to set for a new installation:

# config/_default/config.toml

baseURL = "https://your_domain.com"
languageCode = "en-AU"

title = "My awesome website"

It's also useful to set the author configuration in the config/_default/author.toml file. You can also add links to your profiles here to enable them in the theme.

# config/_default/author.toml

[author]
name = "Your name"
twitter = "https://twitter.com/username"

Organising content

By default, Congo doesn't force you to use a particular content type. In doing so you are free to define your content as you wish. You might prefer pages for a static site, posts for a blog, or projects for a portfolio.

The same logic applies to taxonomies. Some people prefer to use tags and categories, others prefer to use topics.

Hugo defaults to using posts, tags and categories out of the box and this will work fine if that's what you want. If you wish to customise this, however, you can do so by creating the following files:

# config/_default/taxonomies.toml

topic = "topics"

This will replace the default tags and categories with topics. Refer to the Hugo Taxonomy docs for more information on naming taxonomies.

When you create a new taxonomy, you will need to adjust the navigation links on the website to point to the new sections:

# config/_default/menus.toml

[[menu.main]]
  name = "Blog"
  pageRef = "/posts/"
  weight = 10

[[menu.main]]
  name = "Topics"
  pageRef = "/topics/"
  weight = 20

Customising the theme

There are a couple of ways you can make style changes to Congo.

If you just need to add or override some simple styles, you can do so by creating a custom.css file in your project's static/css/ folder. This file will be loaded automatically after the theme's default styles.

Alternatively, if you'd like to make a major change, you can take advantage of Tailwind CSS's JIT compiler and rebuild the entire theme CSS from scratch.

Note: Building the theme manually is intended for advanced users.

Change into the themes/congo/ folder and install the project dependencies.

npm install

Once installed, you can edit the themes/congo/tailwind.config.js to change the styles that are applied throughout the theme. You can also adjust specific styles in themes/congo/assets/css/main.css.

To allow for easy theme colour changes, Congo defines a primary and secondary colour palette that is used throughout the theme. In order to change the colour across the entire theme, simply edit the tailwind.config.js file accordingly.

For example, to change to a green colour scheme, you could apply these changes:

  // themes/congo/tailwind.config.js

  theme: {
    colors: {
      transparent: "transparent",
      white: colors.white,
      gray: colors.gray,
      primary: colors.lime,
      secondary: colors.teal,
    },
    ...
  }

For a full list of colours available, and their corresponding configuration values, see the official Tailwind docs.

After editing the configuration, you need to rebuild the theme's stylesheets.

npm run build

This will automatically output a minified CSS file to /themes/congo/static/css/main.css.

To aid with testing style changes, you can also run the Tailwind JIT comiler in watch mode.

npm run dev

Now whenever you make a change, the (non-minified) CSS files will be rebuilt automatically. This mode is useful to run when using hugo server to preview your site during development. Remember to perform a full build before publishing your website.

Shortcodes

In addition to all the default Hugo shortcodes, Congo adds a few extras for additional functionality.

Alert

alert outputs its contents as a stylised message box within your article. It's useful for drawing attention to important information that you don't want the reader to miss.

The input is written in Markdown so you can format it however you please.

Usage:

{{< alert >}}
**Warning!** This action is destructive!
{{< /alert >}}

Icon

icon outputs an SVG icon and takes the icon name as its only parameter. The icon is scaled to match the current text size.

Usage:

{{< icon "github" >}}

Icons are populated using Hugo pipelines which makes them very flexible. Congo ships with a default set of icons for social, email, and generic links. If you want to add your own icons, you can simply place them in /assets/icons/ and reference them using the icon shortcode passing in the icon's filename (without the .svg. extension).

Icons can also be used in partials by calling the icon partial.

Usage:

  {{ partial "icon.html" "github" }}

Lead

lead is used to bring emphasis to the start of an article. It can be used to style an introduction, or to call out an important piece of information. Simply wrap any Markdown content in the lead shortcode.

{{< lead >}}
When life gives you lemons, make lemonade.
{{< /lead >}}

Mermaid

mermaid allows you to draw detailed diagrams and visualisations using text. It uses MermaidJS under the hood and supports a wide variety of diagrams, charts and other output formats.

Simply write your Mermaid syntax within the mermaid shortcode and let the plugin do the rest.

Usage:

{{<mermaid>}}
graph LR;
A[Lemons]-->B[Lemonade];
B-->C[Profit]
{{</mermaid>}}

Refer to the official Mermaid docs for details on syntax and supported diagram types.

Contributing

Congo is still very much a work in progress. I intend to keep adding features and making changes as required.

Bugs & Suggestions

Feel free to get in touch with any issues or suggestions for new features you'd like to see. Please use GitHub issues for all bug reports and suggestions to help keep everything in one spot.

If you're able to fix a bug or implement a new feature, I welcome PRs for this purpose.