Hello Thomas,

On Fri, May 4, 2018 at 2:50 AM Thomas S. Dye <tsd@tsdye.com> wrote:

> This looks like an interesting project.
>
> I've browsed the various Hugo themes and the example web sites. I
> think I've seen websites similar to and themes suitable for a
> variety of sites I'd like to consolidate: archaeology course
> syllabus and class calendar; documentation for a software project;
> a publication list with download links; and a book/article review
> blog.


That's correct, you can use Hugo to generate any of those kinds of sites. I
use it for my blog, the ox-hugo doc site itself, the bare-bones ox-hugo
test site, product doc site at work. I have also used it in the past for a
"for-rent" site in the past (and it worked ;-)).


>   I use org-mode for writing these kinds of thing now, and
> I'm hoping to work out a way to make my org mode source work with
> Hugo.
>

At minimum you just need the #+hugo_base_dir keyword and EXPORT_FILE_NAME
property (if using per-subtree flow). So it should not be too difficult. To
get an idea, I made these[1] changes to make the pre-existing use-package
Org manual ready for ox-hugo export.


> I'm especially keen on previewing the web pages as I work on them,
> which was super easy to set up (thanks!),


Great! So I gather that you were able to get a preliminary setup of
ox-hugo + Hugo working?


> and generating  "responsive" content to satisfy my smartphone connected
> students.
>

That part is not too difficult if you want to get the basic
responsiveness.. just adding the viewport meta tag in HTML head does most
of the job:

<meta name="viewport" content="width=device-width, initial-scale=1,
maximum-scale=5">

You need to get into CSS hacking if you want to go further in @media based
CSS formatting, or implementing CSS grids, etc.


> I see that ox-hugo and many Hugo templates have a blog as their
> focus.  Is it reasonable to go down the ox-hugo path for my
> planned sites?


I think so, as I mentioned earlier, I have used it for a variety of sites.
The Hugo theme tagging system is not great as it relies completely on what
the theme authors manually tag those as. But this[2] gives a small
selection of themes for documentation sites. I might find more sites that
fit your needs as you explore each of the themes on that site (don't reply
100% on tags).


>   Or, is the blog focus likely to restrict what I'd like to do?
>

Hugo Go templating is very powerful[3]. It inherently has no restrictions.
The templating language does not have a "blog focus".

If you decide to use a theme, just as is[*], then that's a restriction. I
would suggest to pick a theme that best fits your need, and then gradually
mold (mould?) it as you learn more of Go templating, to make it perfect for
you.

Thanks.

Kaushal


[1]:
https://github.com/jwiegley/use-package/commit/dede56276ce157fb55f84562b10a70978c34230e#diff-980e09e4bfed99830873c784dfb12a7a

[2]: https://themes.gohugo.io/tags/documentation/

[3]: Here are some of the professional non-blog sites created using Hugo:
https://gohugo.io/showcase/.

[*]: Being Emacs users, I doubt if the "use the theme as is" would work for
any of us ;-)
-- 

Kaushal Modi