What's New

See the changelog of this version for a detailed list of changes.

  • 0.126.3 Minimum required Hugo version

  • Breaking Change requiring action after upgrade

  • Change Change of behavior, may require action

  • New New behavior, often introducing new options

Version 8

8.1.0 (2025-10-05)

Change

  • Change The children shortcode has learned to show its children in a nice card layout.

    This required to deprecate the containerstyle and style parameter in favor of the new type parameter. Your build will succeed as before but will give you detailed warnings how to migrate your old settings to the new for each occurance.

    If you haven’t set containerstyle or style no changes are necessary. If you used

    • containerstyle=ul or style=li now use type=tree
    • style=h* now use type=list
    • any other containerstyle or style now use type=flat

    If you want to use the new card layout, use type=card.

  • Change The externalLinkTarget config option has changed its default from _blank to _self causing external links by default to be opened in the same tab.

    If you want to get back to the previous behavior of opening external links in a new tab, set externalLinkTarget='_blank' in your hugo.toml.

New

8.0.0 (2025-09-11)

Hugo 0.126.3

  • 0.126.3 This release requires a newer Hugo version.

Breaking

Change

  • Change The <h1> color for the page heading has changed its default value from --MAIN-TEXT-color to the more logical --MAIN-TITLES-TEXT-color.

    If you experience a change in your page title color after upgrading, just set --MAIN-TITLES-H1-TEXT-color to your previously used color.

  • Change For the children shortcode the final default value if parameter sort=auto and no ordersectionsby setting was found has changed from weight to default.

    If your weights are all correctly set you will not recognize a difference. If you have duplicate weights on a level or have not set weights at all while sorting should happen by weight, this change will lead to a deterministic order while previously it didn’t.

New

  • New The theme has updated its Mermaid dependency to 11.8.0. This adds support for radar graphs and treemaps.

Version 7

7.6.0 (2025-04-03)

New

  • New Information was added to the docs about the kind of data the theme stores in the readers browser.

  • New The new tree shortcode displays lists as nicely formatted trees with configurable icon and icon color.

  • New The icon shortcode has learned the style and color options known from other shortcodes.

  • New The theme supports versioning now, where you can keep older versions of your site accessible via a version switcher at the top of the menu.

  • New The menu configuration for the main menu area, introduced in 7.1.0, is extended to the non-scrolling menu header area between search box and main scrolling area using the sidebarheadermenus option and to the menu footer area using the sidebarfootermenus option.

    The configuration for all sidebar menus is similar and now comes with two new types of menus.

    The divider type adds a horizontal ruler.

    The custom type allows to insert any HTML snippets into the menu. The HTML must be wrapped in a li element to not break HTML validation. The theme ships with the following snippets:

    • languageswitcher: will display the language switcher
    • variantswitcher: will display the variant switcher
    • versionswitcher: will display the version switcher
    • historyclearer: will display a button to clear the history of visited links

    You don’t need to change anything in your existing installation as the old configuration is used as a default.

  • New Translation into Ukrainian. This language is not supported for search.

7.5.0 (2025-03-04)

Change

  • Change All dependencies were moved from static to assets. Affected are stylesheets, scripts and fonts.

    This is mainly done to reduce the output in public to only contain necessary files of your site.

    E.g. if you don’t use math anywhere on your site, it is not necessary to output the MathJax library to public.

    The directory structure will be adjusted so all 3rd-party dependencies are stored in their appropriate module sub directory. So what previously was static/js/js-yaml.js will become assets/j/js-yaml/js-yaml.js.

    Take a look into the new assets directory. Only if you have overridden some of these files, you will have to adjust their paths accordingly. All other additional files should stay where they are.

  • Change Buttons for languages written right to left are now rendered correctly, so you will experience visual differences in those cases. This applies to

    • the Mermaid zoom button depending on the page’s language
    • inline and block copy-to-clipboard buttons depending of the contained text content

7.4.0 (2025-02-21)

Change

  • Change The way you link to pages in a different language has changed. Until now this was an undocumented feature.

    Previously you could prepend an URL with the language code, e.g. /pir/my-page to link to pages of other languages. This could cause problems if you have a page with the same name as the language code on the top level of your page structure.

    Now you have to set the query parameter lang to the language code, e.g. /my-page?lang=pir.

    As this was previously undocumented, most projects will not be affected. If you still need the old behavior, you can set enableLegacyLanguageLinks=true in your hugo.toml.

  • Change The target parameter of the button shortcode was deprecated.

    Use link effects on the href parameter instead. You don’t need to change anything as the old parameter still works but may generate warnings.

New

  • New The theme now allows page references (given as pageRef of a Hugo menu item, pageRef parameter of a sidebarmenus entry and the menuPageRef in a page’s front matter) to also be global resources from your assets directory.

  • New If link.errorlevel is configured, now also page references will be checked for existence.

  • New You can now configure an ignore list of regular expressions for addresses that should be ignored if an errorlevel test fails. This is configured by setting errorignore=[] globally in your hugo.toml for all errorlevel checks.

    This helps to remove false negatives while still benefitting from the check for all other addresses.

  • New It is now possible to add query parameter and an optional fragment part to all links. This is regardless whether it is a local or remote address and also applies to Hugo’s internal path.

    By that you can now use it on Markdown links and image links, page references and buttons.

  • New You can now link to different output formats of a page by adding a query parameter.

    For example to link to the print format of a page, write /my-page?format=print.

  • New There are two new image effects that are usable if the linked image points to a resource:

    • dataurl: resource is converted to a base64 encoded dataurl
    • inlinecontent: in case of SVG resources, the content will be used instead of an <img> element, this is useful for applying additional CSS styles to the elements inside of the SVG which is otherwise impossible

  • New This release introduces link effects which work similar to image effects and can be set as query parameter on any link.

    With that you currently can specify

    • target: set a link target individually for each link
    • download: a click on the link should result in a file download instead of a navigation

  • New The theme supports the new source output format which behaves similar in configuration as the markdown output format but allows the original Markdown source including the front matter of a page to be viewed.

    You can see this in action on the above linked page, accessible by clicking the topbar button.

  • New If you haven’t overridden layouts/partials/custom-header.html and css/custom.css and/or js/custom.js is present in your project, the theme now adds them to your pages.

    This was done to be compatible with adding custom scripts in an older version of the Hugo documentation.

  • New If you haven’t overridden layouts/partials/content-footer.html, you can now configure which page meta information - like author’s name, email address and authoring date - should be displayed. Also the date format is now configurable.

  • New The logo color is now configurable via the --MENU-HEADER-color variable in your variant stylesheets.

  • New Now favicons are also searched in the assets/images directory.

  • New Table headers are sticky now.

  • New The themes documentation has been moved from exampleSite to docs to make place for a brand new exampleSite. Welcome on board the The Purple Pulpo!

    This was done because the docs contained to much docs specific configuration and quirks. The new exampleSite is meant as a starting template for your own project with minimal initial configuration.

7.3.0 (2025-01-26)

New

  • New Support for Hugo’s built-in details shortcode by mapping it to the theme’s expand shortcode.

  • New The topbar button for the print format can now be hidden if the print output format is active by setting disablePrintButton=true in your hugo.toml or Front Matter.

  • New The theme supports the new markdown output format which behaves similar in configuration as the print output format but allows the Markdown source of a page to be viewed.

    You can see this in action on the above linked page, accessible by clicking the topbar button.

  • New Keyboard support for code blocks was improved so the copy to clipboard button is now reachable by TAB if disableHoverBlockCopyToClipBoard=false was set in the hugo.toml.

  • New Further accessibility improvements were made for the anchor, copy to clipboard and mermaid reset functionality by using a HTML button instead of a span.

7.2.0 (2024-12-10)

Change

  • Change The expand shortcode was refactored and now internally uses the notice shortcode.

    Due to these changes, expand and notice with style=transparent will now generate slightly different margins.

  • Change This release fixes a long standing issue, where loading a page with a non-default variant may caused screen flashing.

    Fixing this resulted in major changes how stylesheets are bundled during built and ultimately leads to different stylesheets been loaded in the browser. If you haven’t done any undocumented stuff with the stylesheets, this change should not have any negative effects to your site.

    You need to make changes to your custom theme variant stylesheet if it contains

    • @font-face rules - they need to be moved to assets/css/fonts.css, assets/css/custom.css or layouts/partials/custom-header.html
    • rules selecting the html element - replace html with :root

    Also, please note that now the variant generator is not included in the theme release anymore but is only available in the docs. As a side effect, less JavaScript will be loaded on your site.

New

  • New As a fallout of fixing the flashing issue, you can now minify the bundled stylesheets by setting the minify parameter in your hugo.toml. Without configuring this parameter, the theme will minify the stylesheets for production (hugo) but not for development (hugo server).

  • New The notice shortcode was improved for accessibility and comes with a brand new parameter groupid.

  • New The theme has updated its Mermaid dependency to 11.4.1. This adds support for Kanban diagrams.

  • New Translation into Persian. This language is not supported for search.

7.1.0 (2024-10-25)

Change

  • Change The sidebar menus are now completely configurable.

    This is provided by the new parameter sidebarmenus. With the new system, you can

    • show arbitrary amounts of menus
    • set headings for each menu
    • base it on your page structure or use Hugo’s menu feature
    • configure a starting page if a menu is based on page structure
    • display unlimited nesting for both menu types
    • reconfigure the menus in a page’s front matter
    • apply the usual parameter alwaysopen, collapsibleMenu, etc. for all menu types

    You don’t need to change anything in your existing installation as the old configuration is used as a default.

  • Change The children shortcode was changed to output a page’s LinkTitle instead of previously using the Title.

    As the shortcode always outputs subpages in context of the parent page, it functions similar to the sidebar menu. The sidebar menu itself uses the LinkTitle for naming the menu entries and so should the shortcode do.

    The parameter value sort=linktitle was deprecated for the easier sort=title. You can still use the old value but both behave the same way in sorting by LinkTitle.

New

  • New Menus created by your page structure are now able to contain arbitrary links inserted into the structure using the menuUrl or menuPageRef front matter.

7.0.0 (2024-10-15)

Hugo 0.126.0

  • 0.126.0 This release requires a newer Hugo version.

Breaking

  • Breaking This release comes with significant changes in file naming of partials and how the theme works internally. This was done because the theme

    • suffered from poor build performance for sites with 1000 or more pages
    • reinvented the wheel instead of using available Hugo mechanisms

    What do I gain, you may ask. A significant performance boost during build! Usually, the build time has been cut at least in half for bigger sites. It is now possible to build even larger sites with 5000 or more pages. This was previously almost impossible due to rapidly increasing build time with the more pages you’ve introduced. For even bigger sites, the theme now has configurable performance optimizations - at the price of feature limitations.

    If you haven’t done customizations to any partials, you can update right away.

    If you have customized your templates, in the best cases, you will get build warnings or even errors. In the worst cases, your build succeeds but the site will not work as intended by you.

    Specifically, you will have to adapt your site if you have

  • Breaking This release changes the way the search index and the dedicated search page are generated. This may require reconfiguration by you to still work as you have intended.

    Remove the now obsolete search and searchpage output format from [outputs.home] in your hugo.toml, resulting in something similar to

    hugo.
    [outputs]
  home = ['html', 'rss', 'print']
    outputs:
  home:
  - html
  - rss
  - print
    {
   "outputs": {
      "home": [
         "html",
         "rss",
         "print"
      ]
   }
}

    After that, your build will succeed but will may cause new defaults to be applied. With no further settings, in-page search, search popup and dedicated search page are all active by default. This can be reconfigured.

    In addition, you are now able to overwrite the default file name of the search index and the default page name of the dedicated search page by changing searchIndexURL and searchPageURL respectively in your hugo.toml.

Change

  • Change Once again, the theme changed the font. We switched to the excellent Roboto Flex font.

    Care was taken to configure the font to look similar to the previously used Work Sans. Nevertheless, in direct comparison, you will see slight differences in appearance.

    This change was necessary as the previously used font had display issues with marked text, contrast, and some other minor stuff. As an aftermath, the number of requests and the download size were decreased when loading a page.

    The font was created by Google, is licensed under OFL 1.1 and is delivered from your theme’s installation. As always, no third-party server calls are involved.

    If you have changed the font-family in your installation, you most likely have to adjust the variables --MAIN-font-weight, --MAIN-BOLD-font-weight and --MAIN-letter-spacing.

    Additionally, if you have changed the font to a variable font in your installation, you may have to adjust the variable --MAIN-font-variation-settings. As this only applies to variable fonts, this should rarely be necessary.

  • Change While switching the font, it was discovered that certain CSS variables were falsely named. You don’t need to change anything in your custom variant stylesheet as the old names will be used as a fallback.

    --MAIN-TITLES-TEXT-font was renamed to --MAIN-TITLES-font, --MAIN-TITLES-H<n>-color was renamed to --MAIN-TITLES-H<n>-TEXT-color.

  • Change The options and front matter to force loading a math, mermaid or openapi library has been changed.

    Previously, you had to set the unintuitive disableMathJax=false to force load the math library in case of a passthrough configuration. This is replaced by the simpler math=true or math.force=true and is now in line with Hugo’s official documentation.

    You don’t need to change anything yet but will receive warnings if the old settings are used.

  • Change The default logo is not contained inside of the theme’s logo partial anymore.

    This is to avoid usage of the theme’s branding throughout the web in non-modified installations.

    In addition, the default text for the logo partial is now taken from the linkTitle setting of your hugo.toml.

New

Older Versions