Hugo Magnolia 🌸 | Demo

A simple, completely customizable, multilingual Hugo theme thought for professionals and small businesses.

I decided to give my personal thank you to the Hugo developers and community by making this theme available for everyone.

I strongly value the open source community as in these years i’ve been using many open source projects that made my life better and improved my digital freedom in many ways.

Freedom makes us better humans, and makes us improve our status faster and in an easier way.

Make sure to star this repo!

Features ⚡

I built this theme with simplicity in mind, it is small and easily customizable, responsive, modular and multilingual. But it also leaves some space to further in-depth customization since it uses Bootstrap and SCSS.

This theme is thought to be used as a personal / business theme, it can provide a great landing page for your activity!

1. Responsive

• The theme is fully responsive and shows perfectly on every screen size.

2. Modular

• Hide and show some elements easily from the config file.

3. Multilingual

• The default content language is english (it can be changed), but you can add as many languages as you want very easily, the theme includes an italian language example and a dropdown menù for easily switching between languages. Permalinks can be localized in each language (eg. you can have /contacts for english and /contatti for italian).

4. Customizable

These are the currently customizable sections:

• Landing page
• “Services” page with arbitrary number of points
• “Office” page with integrated google maps view for directions
• Contacts page with FormSpree connected form and opening hours

5. SEO ready

• Every page has an easily customizable meta description and a unique meta title for better and easier indexing. The theme will use the image static/img/meta-image as meta image for Google, Facebook and Twitter. There is a robots.txt file which indicates the correct location of the sitemap index for faster indexing.

6. Google Analytics supported

• Insert your Google Analytics tag in the config.toml file and be ready to track your site performances easily.

7. Google Maps included

• The contact page can be easily customized by adding a google maps link to get directions towards your activity location.

Quick start: how to install 📥

1. Install hugo extended, follow the official installation guide. For using this theme you DO NOT NEED to execute hugo new site, as you will be cloning an example site in step 2.

2. Clone the exampleSite and the theme from the repo:git init && git clone -b exampleSite --recurse-submodules https://github.com/ololiuhqui/magnolia-free-hugo-theme <YourSiteName> (change <YourSiteName> in the command with the name you wanna give to your site).

3. Delete your default config.toml from the root folder of your site; the new configurations will be found in config/_default. The main configuration file is config/_default/config.toml, but most variables are overwritten or defined by the individual language configuration files (eg. config/_default/languages/.en.toml)

4. Move to your site directory and see the website preview with hugo serve -D

How to update ♻

• From the root directory of your website run: git submodule update --remote --merge.

How to customize 🎨

• Use your preferred color palette by modifying the Bootstrap variables in assets/scss/custom-variables.scss.

• Change the config files in /config/_default and /config/_default/languages adding your own elements to the pages. You can change the page names there as well.

• Change the pages names, slugs and metadescriptions in content/<language>/<page>.html. The _index.html in the root of every content language folder is the homepage, refer to Content organization | Hugo.

• Change the images of the website from the static or content folders (some pages use Page bundles), please notice that the name and the format of the images should be the same of the ones currently present in the exampleSite (that you cloned in step 2 of “how to install” guide).

Add new languages 🚩

1. Head to config/_default/languages.
2. Duplicate one of the language files, change the language tag, name of the file (en, it, fr etc): this should be compliant with RFC 5646. Use the RFC 5646 Language Tags List for a quicker setup.
3. Translate the variables values inside the .toml file accordingly to the language.
4. In the /content directory, duplicate one of the language folders and change the name accordingly to your new language as in step 2.
5. For each of the .html file in /content, you can change title and slug freely. translationKey should remain untouched.
6. I strongly suggest you to update the SEO in the frontmatter as well in your new language.

Custom 404 page

To add the custom 404 page and make it work on github pages or other hostings, you will have to add it manually when building the site executing hugo. This is because github pages looks for a 404 template in the root directory of the project, you can therefore only have one single 404 page for all the languages. To create a symlink to the english 404 version, which will then be used as default 404 once hosting, after running hugo run ln -s public/en/404/index.html public/404.html.

Remunerate my time and energy 💫

Designing this theme and making it available for you took a lot of time and effort.

The MIT license means that you are completely free to do whatevere you want with this theme, even make money from it!

If you wish you can support me in several ways:

Single donation:

bc1q26f4gscc5ksujdx6wzxfnlqeqt02p3sjcqwvln

Recurring donations:

Contribute 🛠

Notes on how this repo works

This repo includes two main branches: main and exampleSite.

The exampleSite directory will not be shown in main branch. If you clone the main branch you will therefore be able to modify the theme and its content only, if you clone the exampleSite branch you will be able to modify the exampleSite content only. As an alternative you can also clone the exampleSite with the recurse-submodules option, that will also add the theme main as submodule, making it available for changes.

Content:

Things that should be probably added to this theme

Add a blog functionality

Currently the theme doesn’t properly support a blog functionality: you can add as many pages as you want but they do not appear anywhere in the site unless you share the direct link.

This is because the theme is thought to host a very simple landing website. It might be cool to include an optional blog feature though.

Some layout would need to be redesigned to include posts.

A very simple single layout is already included. A list layout is lacking.

Some taxonomies are disabled in config.toml to avoid indexing of empty pages, these would need to be re-enabled for making use of tags and categories.

Add proper Bootstrap theming

Only some bootstrap variables are reassigned, leaving a lot of them to defaults. Properly assigning all the most important variables would make building, modifying and styling the theme much easier with less manual SCSS/CSS needed.

I included the scss/custom-variable.scss file to overwrite the default variables, this would need to be updated as well with the variables that get styled in the theme, in order to give the theme user the ability to easily customize the site appeareance.

Refer to:

• Customize · Bootstrap v5.0.
• Example bootstrap themes + easily style with UI

Add different configuration environments

Hugo adds the possibility to use a production environment, specifying some defaults. Despite we make use of the _default folder name in the configs, a better implementation, which includes a development and a production environment would yet need to be made. Check Glossary of terms - Environment | Hugo and Configure Hugo | Hugo.

Ensure accessibility

The website still lacks a focus on accessibility, this needs to be addressed.

See also

• Paige
• Lightbi
• Up Business Theme
• Hugoplate
• Bootstrap Theme for Personal Blog and Documentations