Congo

Congo is designed to be a simple, lightweight theme for Hugo. It's built using Tailwind CSS with a clean and minimalist design that prioritises to your content.

🌏 Demo site
📑 Theme documentation
🐛 Bug reports & issues
💡 Questions & feature requests

Features

• Built with Tailwind CSS JIT for minified stylesheets without any excess code
• Fully responsive layout
• Dark mode (auto-switching based upon browser)
• Highly customisable configuration
• Multiple homepage layouts
• Flexible with any content types, taxonomies and menus
• Ability to link to posts on third-party websites
• Diagrams and visualisations using Mermaid JS
• SVG icons from FontAwesome 5
• Heading anchors, Buttons, Badges and more
• HTML and Emoji support in articles
• SEO friendly with links for sharing to social media
• RSS feeds
• Fathom Analytics and Google Analytics support
• Favicons support
• Comments support
• Advanced customisation using simple Tailwind colour definitions and styles
• Fully documented

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Installation

This is a simplified set of instructions and assumes a basic understanding of building Hugo sites and installing themes. For detailed instructions, refer to the full theme documentation.

There are a few ways to install the Congo theme into your Hugo website.

Install using Hugo

This method is the quickest and easiest for keeping the theme up-to-date. Hugo Modules uses Go to initialise and manage modules so you need to ensure you have Go installed before proceeding.

1. Download and install Go. You can check if it's already installed by using the command go version.

2. From your Hugo project's directory, initiate the Hugo Modules system for your website:

   hugo mod init github.com/<username>/<repo-name>
   

3. Add the theme to your configuration by creating a new file config/_default/module.toml and adding the following:

   [[imports]]
   path = "github.com/jpanther/congo"
   

4. Start your server using hugo server and the theme will be downloaded automatically.

5. Continue to set up the theme configuration files.

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 -b stable https://github.com/jpanther/congo.git themes/congo

Then continue to set up the theme configuration files.

Install manually

Download the latest release of the theme from: https://github.com/jpanther/congo/releases/latest

Extract the archive, rename the folder to congo and move it to the themes/ directory inside your Hugo project.

Then continue to set up the theme configuration files.

Set up theme configuration files

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

Depending on how you installed the theme you will find the theme config files in different places:

• Hugo Modules: In the Hugo cache directory, or download a copy from GitHub
• Git submodule or Manual install: themes/congo/config/_default

Important: If you didn't use Hugo Modules to install Congo, you must add the line theme = "congo" to the top of your config.toml file.

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

Configuration

For all the theme options and detailed configuration instructions, refer to the Congo docs.

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"

[author]
name = "Your name"
links = [
  { twitter = "https://twitter.com/jpanther" }
]

Advanced customisation

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.

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Contributing

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

Feel free to get in touch with any issues or suggestions for new features you'd like to see.

• 🐛 Bug reports & issues: Use GitHub Issues
• 💡 Ideas for new features: Open a discussion on GitHub Discussions
• 🙋‍♀️ General questions: Head to GitHub Discussions

If you're able to fix a bug or implement a new feature, I welcome PRs for this purpose. Learn more in the contributing guidelines.