A personal academic website theme for Hugo.

Key features:

• Designed for academic staff, students, or general personal use
• Includes Biography, Publications, Projects, News/Blog, Teaching, and Contact sections
• Write in Markdown for easy formatting and code highlighting, with LaTeX for mathematical expressions
• Academic linking (Scholar etc.), Google Analytics, and Disqus comments
• Responsive and mobile friendly
• Simple and refreshing one page design
• Easy to customize

1. Install Hugo and create a new website:

    hugo new site my_website
    cd my_website
   

2. Install Academic theme with git:

    git clone [email protected]:gcushen/hugo-academic.git themes/academic
   

   Or alternatively, install by downloading from Github into a themes/academic folder within your Hugo website.

3. If you are creating a new website, copy the contents of the exampleSite folder to your website root folder, overwriting existing files if necessary. The exampleSite folder contains an example config file and content to help you get started.

    cp -av themes/academic/exampleSite/* .
   

4. Start the Hugo server from your website root folder:

    hugo server --watch
   

   Now you can go to localhost:1313 and your new Academic themed website should appear.

5. Customize your website (see next section), build it by running hugo, and deploy it by copying the public/ directory (by FTP, Rsync, git push, etc.) to your production web server.

Assuming you created a new website with the example content following the installation steps above, this section explores just a few more steps in order to customize it.

The core parameters for the website can be edited in the config.toml configuration file.

As can be seen in the example config.toml, the social/academic networking icons and education qualifications are defined as multiples of [[params.social]] and [[params.education]] respectively. They can be duplicated or deleted as necessary.

Homepage sections will automatically disappear if you remove content (content/) from them. Thus, the news/blog feature can be removed simply by deleting any files in content/post/.

For deployment, the baseURL variable should be changed to match your website URL such as baseURL = "http://your-site.org/". The example Disqus commenting variable should be cleared (e.g. disqusShortname = "") or set to your own Disqus shortname to enable commenting. To enable Google Analytics, add your tracking code in config.toml similarly to googleAnalytics = "UA-12345678-9".

Place a cropped portrait photo named portrait.jpg into the static/img/ folder, overwriting any defaults.

Edit your biography in the example content/home/about.md file. The research interests and qualifications are stored separately as interests and params.education variables in config.toml, as can be seen in the example config. It's possible to completely hide the interests and education lists by deleting their respective variables.

To create a new publication:

hugo new publication/my-paper-name.md

Then edit the default variables at the top of content/publication/my-paper-name.md to include the details of your publication. The url_ variables are used to generate links associated with your publication, such as for viewing PDFs of papers. Here is an example:

+++
abstract = "An abstract..."
authors = ["First author's name", "Second author's name"]
date = "2013-07-01"
image = ""
image_preview = ""
math = false
publication = "The publishing part of the citation goes here. You may use *Markdown* for italics etc."
title = "A publication title, such as title of a paper"
url_code = ""
url_dataset = ""
url_pdf = "pdf/my-paper-name.pdf"
url_project = ""
url_slides = ""
url_video = ""
+++

Further details on your publication can be written here using *Markdown* for formatting. This text will be displayed on the Publication Detail page.

The url_ links can either point to local or web content. Associated local publication content, such as PDFs, may be copied to a static/pdf/ folder and referenced like url_pdf = "pdf/my-paper-name.pdf".

You can also associate custom link buttons with the publication by adding the following block(s) within the variable preamble above, which is denoted by +++:

[[url_custom]]
    name = "Custom Link"
    url = "http://www.example.org"

Note that the image variables are just placeholders that may be used to reference associated images. If desired, you can modify the publication detail and list pages to show the respective images. These images should be referenced similarly to the above process for PDFs, but using the static/img/ folder.

To create a blog/news article:

hugo new post/my-article-name.md

Then edit the newly created file content/post/my-article-name.md with your full title and content.

You may use Markdown to format the content. Furthermore, code highlighting and LaTeX math rendering are supported. To enable LaTeX math rendering for a page, you should include math = true in the preamble, as demonstrated in the included example site.

Images may be added to a post by placing them in your static/img/ folder and referencing them in Markdown such as with ![alt text](img/my-image.jpg).

To create a project:

hugo new project/my-project-name.md

Then edit the newly created file content/project/my-project-name.md. Either you can link the project to an external project website by setting the external_link = "http://external-project.com" variable at the top of the file, or you can add content (below the final +++) in order to render a project page on your website.

To add a new section to the home page:

hugo new home/my-section-name.md

Then edit the newly created file content/home/my-section-name.md with your section title and content. In the +++ preamble, you should also increment the section_id to ensure it's unique amongst the other sections in content/home and you can adjust weight variable to change the order within the custom section of the home page.

You may also wish to add a navigation link to the new section. This can be achieved by adding something similar to the following lines to your config.toml, where the URL will consist of the first title word in lowercase:

[[menu.main]]
    name = "Research"
    url = "#research"
    weight = 10

Generally, to remove content, simply delete the relevant file from your content/post, content/publication, content/project, or content/home folder.

Then you can re-build and view the updated website with the hugo and hugo server --watch commands, respectively.

It is possible to carry out many customizations without touching any files in themes/academic, making it easier to upgrade the theme in the future.

You can link custom CSS and JS assets (relative to your root static/css and static/js respectively) from your config.toml using custom_css = ["custom.css"] or custom_js = ["custom.js"].

For example, lets make a green theme. First, define custom_css = ["green.css"] in config.toml. Then we can download the example green theme and save it as static/css/green.css, relative to your website root (i.e. not in the themes directory).

Permalinks, or permanent links, are URLs to individual pages and posts on your website. They are permanent web addresses which can be used to link to your content. Using Hugo's permalinks option these can be easily customized. For example, the blog post URL can be changed to the form yourURL/2016/05/01/my-post-slug by adding the following near the top of your config.toml (before [params] settings):

[permalinks]
    post = "/:year/:month/:day/:slug"

Where :slug defaults to the filename of the post, excluding the file extension. However, slug may be overridden on a per post basis if desired, simply by setting slug = "my-short-post-title" in your post preamble.

Feel free to star the project on Github and monitor the commits for updates.

Before upgrading the theme, it is recommended to make a backup of your entire website directory, or at least your themes/academic directory. You can also read about the most recent milestones (but this doesn't necessarily reflect the latest master release).

Before upgrading for the first time, the remote origin repository should be renamed to upstream:

$ cd themes/academic
$ git remote rename origin upstream

To list available updates:

$ cd themes/academic
$ git fetch upstream
$ git log --pretty=oneline --abbrev-commit --decorate HEAD..upstream/master

Upgrade by running:

$ cd themes/academic
$ git fetch upstream
$ git checkout master
$ git merge upstream/master

If you have modified files in themes/academic, git will attempt to auto-merge changes. If conflicts are reported, you will need to manually edit the files with conflicts and add them back (git add <filename>).

If there are any issues after upgrading, you may wish to compare your site with the latest example site to check if any settings changed.

Please use the issue tracker to let me know about any bugs or feature requests, or alternatively make a pull request.

Copyright 2016 George Cushen.

Released under the MIT license.