From 30e804eee5223653ab4c6a2f5dabe6453949ca7d Mon Sep 17 00:00:00 2001 From: spf13 Date: Thu, 20 Feb 2014 19:03:37 -0500 Subject: [PATCH] Adding an introduction to Hugo --- docs/content/overview/introduction.md | 99 +++++++++++++++++++++++++++ 1 file changed, 99 insertions(+) create mode 100644 docs/content/overview/introduction.md diff --git a/docs/content/overview/introduction.md b/docs/content/overview/introduction.md new file mode 100644 index 000000000..93e18b4cb --- /dev/null +++ b/docs/content/overview/introduction.md @@ -0,0 +1,99 @@ +--- +title: "Introduction to Hugo" +date: "2013-07-01" +groups: ['gettingStarted'] +linktitle: "Introduction" +groups_weight: 5 +--- + +## What is Hugo? + +Hugo is a general purpose website framework. Technically speaking, Hugo is +a static site generator. This means that unlike systems like Wordpress, +Ghost & Drupal which run on your web server expensively building a page +every time a visitor requests one, Hugo does the building when you create +your content. Since websites are viewed far more often then they are +edited, Hugo is optimized for website viewing without sacrificing a great +writing experience. + +Sites built with hugo are extremely fast and very secure. Hugo sites can +be hosted anywhere including Heroku, GoDaddy, GitHub pages, S3 +& Cloudfront and work well with CDNs. Hugo sites run without dependencies +on expensive run times like Ruby, Python or PHP and without dependencies +on any databases. + +We think of Hugo as the ideal website creation tool. With nearly instant +built times and the ability to rebuild whenever a change is made Hugo +provides a very fast feedback loop. This is essential when you are +designing websites, but also very useful when creating content. + +## What does Hugo do? + +In technical terms Hugo takes a source directory of markdown files and +templates and uses these as input to create a complete website. + +Hugo boasts the following features: + + * Extremely fast built times (~1ms per page) + * Runs on Mac OSX, Linux and Windows + * Content written in [Markdown](/content/example) + * Easy [installation](/overview/installing) + * Straightforward website [organization](/content/organization) + * Completely customizable [homepage](/layout/homepage) + * Support for different [content types](/content/types) + * Support for website [sections](/content/sections) + * Completely customizable [urls](/extras/urls) + * Render changes [on the fly](/overview/usage) as you develop + * Host your site anywhere + * Support for disqus comments + * Dynamic menu creation + * Support for TOML, YAML and JSON in [frontmatter](/content/front-matter) + * [permalink](/extras/permalinks) pattern support + * [pretty urls](/extras/urls) support + * [shortcodes](/extras/shortcodes) + * [Aliases](/extras/aliases) (redirects) + * Automatic [RSS](/layout/rss) creation + * Support for both go and amber templates + * Support for [categories](/indexes/category) and tags + * Support for configurable [indexes](/indexes/overview) to create your own organization + * Syntax [highlighting](/extras/highlighting) powered by pygments + * Ability to [sort content](/content/ordering) as you desire + * Automatic [table of contents](/extras/toc) generation + * Automatic and user defined [summaries](/content/summaries) + * ["Minutes to Read"](/layout/variables) functionality + * ["Wordcount"](/layout/variables) functionality + +## Who should use Hugo? + +Hugo is for people that prefer writing in a text editor over +a browser. + +Hugo is for people who want to hand code their own website without +worrying about setting up complicated runtimes, dependencies and +databases. + +Hugo is for people building a blog, company site, portfolio, tumblog, +documentation, single page site or a site with thousands of +pages. + +## Why did you write Hugo? + +I wrote Hugo ultimately for a few reasons. First I was disappointed with +wordpress, my then website solution. It rendered slowly. I couldn't create +content as efficiently as I wanted to and needed to be online to write +posts. The constant security updates and the horror stories of people's +hacked blogs. + +I looked at existing static site generators like Jekyll, Middle and Nanoc. +All had complicated dependencies to install and took far longer to render +my blog with hundreds of posts than I felt was acceptable. I wanted +a framework to be able to get rapid feedback while making changes to the +templates and the 5+ minute render times was just too slow. In general +they were also very blog minded and didn't have the ability to have +different content types and flexible urls. + +I wanted to develop a fast and full featured website framework without +dependencies. The Go language seemed to have all of the features I needed +in a language. I began developing Hugo in Go and fell in love with the +language. I hope you will enjoy using (and contributing to) Hugo as much +as I have writing it.