Building a Theme From Scratch: Part One

Recommended BGM: Shape Memory Alloys

Inspiration struck me the other day and I created a mockup of what I think I want this site to look like eventually. That’ll be the subject of a later post, but for now I’ve got a lot of learning to do if I ever want to reach that goal.

That led to me doing a bit of poking around for a good tutorial on how to make Hugo themes, and I ended up spending maybe an hour today following this tutorial on how to make a Hugo theme from scratch by Keith Peters. It’s been extremely helpful in understanding exactly how themes get put together. I’ve completed two out of the four parts so far, and the tutorial recommended that was a good point to take a break at, so I heeded that and called it good for the day.

I added some waymarks of my own into the templates so I could more easily see where each part came from as I went through it.

Couldn’t recommend this tutorial enough so far!

I had originally started following another tutorial on the subject - which was usually the most popular search result - and somewhere around step three it instructed me to download some CSS and JS libraries to do some fancy shit with. Maybe that’s good for people who already understand web development, but I’m an absolute novice and I need to learn all this from scratch to really see how it assembles itself in the final product. Fancy shit need not apply, at least not yet.

Anyway here’s a photo I took of my cat this morning.