Hugo Magnolia 🌸 | Demo

A simple, 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.

This theme is actually very “hugo noob” friendly, as it provides an example site to be used with the latest version of the theme, the main pages are there to be used as they are, with most of the params already in the config files. you can customize the color palette and some of the pages images. This theme also aims to be very well documented in order to be accessible even from a complete stranger and make your site run asap.

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 or blog 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. Each post has the option of adding a featured image, and, if not found, assets/img/meta-image will be used instead as meta image for Google, Facebook and Twitter. All pages that do not have a featured image will have the meta-image by default (eg. homepage, office etc). 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.

8. Ready to Blog

• The theme provides some archetypes and a simple directory structure, you can publish articles/posts in more languages, set a publish date, a featured image, an expiration date and tag your posts. You can create and translate custom tags. Latest posts will appear in the homepage, every tag will have its own list page, and every post will show a list of latest related posts based on tagging. If you include titles in your posts, they will be automatically rendered in a table of contents. SEO is carefully taken care of for posts as well. You can also disable the blog part of the theme entirely if you don’t need it!

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.

• Edit the homepage content in content/<language>/pages/_index.html, markdown supported.

• Edit pages names, slugs and metadescriptions in content/<language>/pages/<page>/index.html.

• Change the images of the website from the content/<language>/pages/<page>/<image> folders (pages and posts use Page bundles).

• Add your own favicon, background and default meta-image (the image used in SEO) in assets/img. These files can be of any extension but must have the same name of the ones currently in the example site assets directory.

How to manage posts ✏️

Enable/Disable Blog

Wait, you told me this theme was noob friendly, I don’t wanna deal with all the blog stuff!

I need a simple landing page and all this blog feature is something I don’t care about!

If you don’t need posts you can disable the blog part of the theme entirely from within the config files and just use Magnolia as a simple landing site.

• To disable tags only rendering and indexing for the entire site -> config.toml uncomment #disableKinds = ['taxonomy', 'term'].
• To disable post and tags rendering and indexing for the entire site -> config.toml uncomment #disableKinds = ['taxonomy', 'term'] and #ignoreFiles= ['posts/*'].

Content organization

The /content folder contains different types of content, the content organization mimicts the site structure.

content
├── en
│   ├── _index.md
│   ├── pages
│   ├── posts
│   ├── profile.webp
│   └── tags
└── it
    ├── _index.md
    ├── pages
    ├── posts
    ├── profile.webp
    └── tags

For each language, you will find yourself in front of the homepage _index.md and the image used for the homepage presentation section (profile.webp). The other directories will contain exactly what you expect.

pages= normal website pages (office, services etc). posts= site posts. tags = custom tags.

Posts

• Create a new post with: hugo new --kind post-bundle content/<lang>/posts/<post-name>. This will be its very simple structure:

content/en/posts
├── a-poem-about-flowers
│   ├── images
│   │   └── featured.jpg
│   └── index.md

• Edit the metadata in index.md and add your post content below.

• Add a post featured image by subsituting the featured.webp placeholder in /images. The featured image has to be called “featured” but can be of any extension. If you wish you can remove the placeholder to have a text-only post.

Tags

1. One option is to automatically create tags by adding them to posts frontmatters.

2. The second option is to create a new tag with: hugo new --kind tag content/<lang>/tags/<tag-name>. Creating tags this way will allow for a finer manipulation, you can translate tags here by giving the same translationKey in frontmatter in every different language. Hence having your posts sorted the same for each language and have tag pages translations available.

content/en/tags
├── flowers
│   └── _index.md

For more on content organization refefer to Content organization | Hugo.

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/pages, you can change title and slug freely. translationKey should remain untouched or should be changed in every language page file. I strongly suggest you to translate the SEO here as well.
6. For each of the .md files in content/posts/<my-post> translate the content and the frontmatter values you need (eg. summary).

Custom 404 page

To add the custom 404 page and make it work on github pages, 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! With the only obligation to include the attribution!

If you wish you can support me in several ways:

Single donation:

bc1q26f4gscc5ksujdx6wzxfnlqeqt02p3sjcqwvln

Recurring donations:

Contribute 🛠

First of all, PRs are welcome here!

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 RSS feed template for posts

This would be wonderful for setting up automations that use RSS feed as source like Zapier or FTTT.

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

Ensure accessibility

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

See also

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