ᕦʕ •ᴥ•ʔᕤ Bear Cub

Overview

🐻 A lightweight Hugo theme based on Bear Blog and Hugo Bear Blog.

Bear Cub takes care of speed and optimization, so you can focus on writing good content. It is free, multilingual, optimized for search engines, no-nonsense, responsive, light, and fast. Really fast.

Installation

Follow Hugo’s quick start to create an empty website and then clone Bear Cub into the themes directory as a Git submodule:

git submodule add https://github.com/clente/hugo-bearcub themes/hugo-bearcub

To finish off, append a line to the site configuration file:

echo 'theme = "hugo-bearcub"' >> hugo.toml

Features

Like Bear Blog, this theme:

• Is free and open source
• Looks great on any device
• Makes tiny (~5kb), optimized, and awesome pages
• Has no trackers, ads, or scripts
• Automatically generates an RSS feed

But that’s not all! Bear Cub is also…

Accessible

Bear Cub has a few accessibility upgrades when compared to its predecessors. The color palette has been overhauled to make sure everything is readable for users with low vision impairments or color deficiencies, and some interactive elements were made bigger to facilitate clicking for users with a motor impairment.

These small changes mean that Bear Cub passes Google’s PageSpeed test with flying colors.

Secure

Bear Cub’s demo is hosted on GitHub and therefore I’m not in control of its Content Security Policy. However, the theme itself was made with security in mind: there are no inline styles and it uses no JavaScript at all.

If you want to improve your Mozilla Observatory score even further, you should be able to simply add a few headers to your hosting service’s configuration (e.g. Netlify or Cloudflare Pages) and never have to think about it again. My _headers file, for example, looks like this:

/*
  X-Content-Type-Options: nosniff
  Strict-Transport-Security: "max-age=31536000; includeSubDomains; preload" env=HTTPS
  Cache-Control: max-age=31536000, public
  X-Frame-Options: deny
  Referrer-Policy: no-referrer
  Feature-Policy: microphone 'none'; payment 'none'; geolocation 'none'; midi 'none'; sync-xhr 'none'; camera 'none'; magnetometer 'none'; gyroscope 'none'
  Content-Security-Policy: default-src 'none'; manifest-src 'self'; font-src 'self'; img-src 'self'; style-src 'self'; form-action 'none'; frame-ancestors 'none'; base-uri 'none'
  X-XSS-Protection: 1; mode=block

Multilingual

If you need to write a blog that supports more than one language, Bear Cub has you covered! Check out the demo’s hugo.toml file for a sample of how you can setup multilingual support.

By default, the theme creates a translation button that gets disabled when the current page is only available in any other language. You can also choose to hide this button (instead of disabling it) by setting hideUntranslated = true.

More

Every once in a while, as I keep using Bear Cub, I notice that there is some functionality missing. Currently, these are the “advanced features” that I have already implemented:

• Full-text RSS feed: an enhanced RSS feed template that includes the (properly encoded) full content of your posts in the feed itself.
• Static content: you can create empty blog entries that act as links to static files by including link: "{url}" in a post’s front matter. You can also add render: false to your build options to avoid rendering blank posts.
• Skip link: a “skip to main content” link that is temporarily invisible, but can be focused by people who need a keyboard to navigate the web (see PR #5 by @2kool4idkwhat for more information).
• Reply by email: if you supply an email address, the theme creates a “Reply to this post by email” button at the end of every post (see Kev Quirk’s original implementation). This button can be suppressed on a case-by-case by setting hideReply: true in a post’s front matter (see PR #18 by @chrsmutti).
• absfigure shortcode: a shortcut to use the figure shortcode that also converts relative URLs into absolute URLs by using the absURL function.
• Single-use CSS (EXPERIMENTAL): you can add some styles to a single page by writing the CSS you need in assets/{custom_css}.css and then including style: "{custom_css}.css" in the front matter of said page.
• Conditional CSS (EXPERIMENTAL): since Bear Cub does syntax highlighting without inline styles (see hugo.toml for more information), it only load its syntax.css if, and only if, a code block is actually present in the current page.
• Alternative “Herman” style (EXPERIMENTAL): if you want to check out a more modern CSS style, you can change the themeStyle parameter to "herman" in order to activate Herman Martinus’s version of the Blogster Minimal theme for Astro.
• Dynamic social card generation (EXPERIMENTAL): if you don’t add preview images to a post, this template will generate one based on the title. You can see an example below.

Configuration

Bear Cub can be customized with a hugo.toml file. Check out the configuration of the demo for more information.

# Basic config
baseURL = "https://example.com"
theme = "hugo-bearcub"
copyright = "John Doe (CC BY 4.0)"
defaultContentLanguage = "en"

# Generate a nice robots.txt for SEO
enableRobotsTXT = true

# Setup syntax highlighting without inline styles. For more information about
# why you'd want to avoid inline styles, see
# https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTTP/Headers/Content-Security-Policy/style-src#unsafe_inline_styles
[markup]
  [markup.highlight]
    lineNos = true
    lineNumbersInTable = false
    # This allows Bear Cub to use a variation of Dracula that is more accessible
    # to people with poor eyesight. For more information about color contrast
    # and accessibility, see https://web.dev/color-and-contrast-accessibility/
    noClasses = false

# Multilingual mode config. More for information about how to setup translation,
# see https://gohugo.io/content-management/multilingual/
[languages]
  [languages.en]
    title = "Bear Cub"
    languageName = "en-US 🇺🇸"
    LanguageCode = "en-US"
    contentDir = "content"
    [languages.en.params]
      madeWith = "Made with [Bear Cub](https://github.com/clente/hugo-bearcub)"
  [languages.pt]
    title = "Bear Cub"
    languageName = "pt-BR 🇧🇷"
    LanguageCode = "pt-BR"
    contentDir = "content.pt"
    [languages.pt.params]
      madeWith = "Feito com [Bear Cub](https://github.com/clente/hugo-bearcub)"

[params]
  # The description of your website
  description = "Bear Cub Demo"

  # The path to your favicon
  favicon = "images/favicon.png"

  # These images will show up when services want to generate a preview of a link
  # to your site. Ignored if `generateSocialCard = true`. For more information
  # about previews, see https://gohugo.io/templates/internal#twitter-cards and
  # https://gohugo.io/templates/internal#open-graph
  images = ["images/share.webp"]

  # This title is used as the site_name on the Hugo's internal opengraph
  # structured data template
  title = "Bear Cub"

  # Dates are displayed following the format below. For more information about
  # formatting, see https://gohugo.io/functions/format/
  dateFormat = "2006-01-02"

  # If your blog is multilingual but you haven't translated a page, this theme
  # will create a disabled link. By setting `hideUntranslated` to true, you can
  # have the theme simply not show any link
  hideUntranslated = false

  # (EXPERIMENTAL) This theme has two options for its CSS styles: "original" and
  # "herman". The former is what you see on Bear Cub's demo (an optimized
  # version of Hugo Bear Blog), while the latter has a more modern look based on
  # Herman Martinus's version of the Blogster Minimal theme for Astro.
  themeStyle = "original"

  # (EXPERIMENTAL) This theme is capable of dynamically generating social cards
  # for posts that don't have `images` defined in their front matter; By setting
  # `generateSocialCard` to false, you can prevent this behavior. For more
  # information see layouts/partials/social_card.html
  generateSocialCard = true

  # Social media. Delete any item you aren't using to make sure it won't show up
  # in your website's metadata.
  [params.social]
    twitter = "example" # Twitter handle (without '@')
    facebook_admin = "0000000000" # Facebook Page Admin ID

  # Author metadata. This is mostly used for the RSS feed of your site, but the
  # email is also added to the footer of each post. You can hide the "reply to"
  # link by using a `hideReply` param in front matter.
  [params.author]
    name = "John Doe" # Your name as shown in the RSS feed metadata
    email = "me@example.com" # Added to the footer so readers can reply to posts

Contributing

If you come across any problems while using Bear Cub, you can file an issue or create a pull request.

See also

• Hugoplate
• Color Your World
• Lightbi
• Terminal
• Anubis2