Link Effects

The theme offers effects for your linked links.

You can define additional custom link effects and set defaults in your configuration.

The default link effects shipped with the theme are

Name	Description
download	Causes the linked resource to be downloaded instead of shown in your browser. - `false`: a usual link sending you to the location in your browser - `true`: a link to download the resource - <string>: a link to download the resource with the given filename
target	Whether to show the link in a separate browser tab. - `false`: shown in the same tab - <string>: a valid `a` `target` value If the URL is external and `externalLinkTarget` is set, it replaces the value of the link effect configured on the same level (eg. in your `hugo.toml` or in the page’s front matter). Nervertheless the resulting value can still be overwritten by the URL query parameter.

One way to use them is to add them as URL query parameter to each individual link.

This can become cumbersome to be done consistently for the whole site. Instead, you can configure the defaults in your hugo.toml as well as overriding these defaults in a page’s front matter.

Effect Priority

Link effects are applied in the following priority order (lowest to highest):

Built-in defaults
Site-wide configuration in hugo.toml
Page front matter configuration
URL query parameters
Template caller attributes parameter (highest priority)

Explicitly set URL query parameter will override the defaults set for a page or your site. When calling the link partial directly from templates, effects passed via the attributes parameter have the highest priority and will override all other settings.

If an effect accepts boolean values, only setting the parameter name without a value in the URL will set it to true.

Without any settings in your hugo.toml linkEffects defaults to

[linkEffects]
  download = false
  target = false

linkEffects:
  download: false
  target: false

{
   "linkEffects": {
      "download": false,
      "target": false
   }
}

Front Matter This can be overridden in a pages front matter for example by

+++
[params]
  [params.linkEffects]
    target = '_blank'
+++

---
params:
  linkEffects:
    target: _blank
---

{
   "params": {
      "linkEffects": {
         "target": "_blank"
      }
   }
}

Or by explicitly override settings by URL query parameter

[Magic in new window](images/magic.gif?target=_self)

The settings applied to the above link would be

[linkEffects]
  download = false
  target = '_self'

linkEffects:
  download: false
  target: _self

{
   "linkEffects": {
      "download": false,
      "target": "_self"
   }
}

Template Usage

When calling the link partial directly from templates, you can pass effect preferences via the attributes parameter. Effect names can be prefixed with no to disable them.

{{- $attributes := dict "class" "download" }}
{{ partial "shortcodes/link.html" (dict "page" . "url" "file.pdf" "content" "Download PDF" "attributes" $attributes) }}

This approach has the highest priority and will override all other effect settings, including URL query parameters. Effect classes are processed but not added to the final HTML class attribute. Non-effect classes pass through unchanged.

For example, class = "download custom-link-class" will enable the download effect and add custom-link-class to the HTML output, but download will not appear in the final class attribute.