What is Front Matter

documentation

Front matter allows you to change the characteristics of a page through manipulation of the metadata of the website.

All the Hugo front matter fields can be found here; the following list are the ones most used in this project:

---
title: "Default"
date: 2017-10-10T00:54:19+02:00
draft: true

description: "Fiddling around with Front Matter."

thumbnail: "/path_to/image.png"

categories: [
    "documentation",
]
tags: [
	"markdown",
	"hugo",
	"frontmatter",
]

disable_comments: true
---

date doesn’t necessary need the time, it can be omitted. categories & tagsare classics used to group content based on a limited set of categories and different recurring tags. To spice things up use an image (although there’s no way controlling appearance and size) with the thumbnail field. Put static content in the static folder; it will be processed as if it was under the root.

For Google Analytics, put the google***.html file in the static folder and it will show up nicely in the root of your website. Create some additional folders to put structure in there, i.e. for images you might envision a separate folder called img which is then accessible via /img/.

There are several date fields that allow for publishing and unpublishing without the need to actually remove the content. expiryDate & publishDate are self-explanatory.

Some user-defined fields are handy like the disable_comments field which disables the Disqus integration for that specific page. There’s also a main field that forces a menu item in the theme’s menu bar. Use within the main field an additional field name to change the entry on the menu bar to that string.

menu:
  main:
    name: This is the menu title

For navigation, there’s prev and next to control the order of the pages (and not based on the date metadata).