MovableType 2.64 on a 500MHz Pentium 3 with 256MB of RAM
Inconsistent, incomplete, misleading, and/or outsourced documentation.
Enhancement: replace "how to do this in Go" links with "how to do
this in Hugo" pages. (ex: .Date.Format)
Enhancement: extensive one-line code examples:
does section $s exist; retrieve/search its pages
does an article with title $t exist (opt: in section $s); retrieve it
does taxonomy $ta exist; retrieve/search its terms
does term $te exist in taxonomy $ta; retrieve/search its pages
essentially, when I want to count the number of pages in a
specific taxonomy term referenced in the article's front matter,
don't show me how to count all terms in every taxonomy, show me
how to construct the very-non-obvious
(index $.Site.Taxonomies.comments .Params.entry).Count
Speaking of inconsistent and incomplete, index is documented at
hugodocs.info/functions, but not gohugo.io/templates/functions/.
No idea which examples work correctly in the current release, which are new, which are deprecated, which don't do what you'd expect.
min_version in theme.toml, add
tested_versions=[]Bug: setting watch=false doesn't work in config.toml for
hugo server (Mac v0.19), which would make the "too many open files"
issue less annoying. (note: actual open-file count for my site
according to lsof: 9,017)
Pluralization adds complexity without benefit. Seriously, when is it
"tag" vs. "tags", etc? As far as I can tell, the singular is always
used in paths (layouts/taxonomy/tag.html, etc), and the plural
is always used in templates, but I don't know if that's correct and
complete.
How do this work with i18n?
Where does the use of inflect in pluralizeListTitles
come into all of this?
Dumb: section "Elsewhere" title is "Elsewheres"
Dumber: section "Recently spotted" title is "Recently spotteds"
Enhancement: pluralizeListTitles=false should be default
Speaking of which, "You can use the go-i18n tools to manage your translations" is a great example of outsourcing documentation in a way that is completely useless.
Stumbling across preserveTaxonomyNames, good. Finding out that it
preserves case (the obvious way to make a category named "TV" or "SF"
look right), better. Discovering that it leaves " " in the URLS
as well, bad. Breaking .Next.URL, etc in $.Paginator? Priceless.
Enhancement: store the original form of the taxonomy term so you can have both a sanitized version for the URL and the user's preferred display form (.Name and .Display). If the tagging was inconsistent, that's the user's problem.
How did I do it instead? I created a set of key/value pairs in
the data directory (wtf="WTF") and substituted them in:
<ul>
{{ range $key, $value := .Site.Taxonomies.categories }}
<li>{{ index $.Site.Data.casefix $key | default ($key | humanize) }}
{end}}
</ul>
Poorly-explained template search path with no debug output.
Internal pagination template does not scale at all.
WTF is up with twenty different context-dependent .ByWhatever and .GroupByWhatever functions?
Is .ByFoo just syntactic sugar for using the sort function?
How do I put "if section $s1, by-date-ascending, else if $s2, alphabetical" into a template? Or better yet, in /data so I can just set:
[hotnews]
key=".Date"
order="desc"
[quotes]
key=".Author"
order="asc"
[special]
key=".Params.mysortkey"
order="asc"
I'm still not sure what I did that made hugo dump a meaningless
stack trace. Probably an attempt to use the only debugging tool
that's available, {{ printf "%#v" . }}, which sometimes
returns something useful, but usually just fills the page with
noise.
Still trying to figure out if I can have:
auto-generated monthly archive pages with prev/next-month navigation links, and the ability to link N most recent months in sidebar.
Workaround: use a script to fill a section with small content
files, and then put something like this in
layout/archive/single.html
{{ $month := .Params.month }}
{{ range $.Site.Sections.post.Pages.GroupByDate "2006-01" }}
{{ if eq .Key $month }}
{{ range .Pages.ByDate }}
{{ partial "article-summary.html" . }}
{{end}}
{{end}}
{{end}}
prev/next-in-section/taxonomy-term navigation links.
theme/mytheme/content/mysection/_index.md,
but content pages don't work in themes).In other words, between the issues with documentation, examples, etc, I still don't know if Hugo today can generate all of the types of static content that MovableType could in 2003, or if so, how to do it.
No standards in themes; once you're past the mockup stage, you really
can't switch. Theme A mixes all sections in index.html with no
visual differentiation, theme B just shows "post", theme C calls it
"posts" instead, theme D only works if you add specific entries to
config.toml that theme E uses for something else, etc, etc.
No way to identify CJK content so it can be treated differently. For instance, I want to italicize a list of song titles, unless they include kanji, etc. The Go regexp library doesn't seem to support Unicode blocks, so the best I could come up with quickly was to only italicize 7-bit ASCII titles:
{{ $count_cjk := findRE "[^\000-\177]" .Title }}
{{ if ge (len $count_cjk) 1 }}
{{ .Title | safeHTML }}
{{else}}
<i>{{ .Title | safeHTML }}</i>
{{end}}
I forgot to mention one of the first things I had to work around: the
useless auto-stripped .Summary. I had to append <!-- more--> to every
blog entry and comment that I converted from the MT blog, and add it
to archetypes/default.md to make sure I never forget to add it.
<!-- more-->.The SmartyPants implementation has some odd behaviors I'll have to
try to reproduce sometime, but the most obvious problem I ran into is
that you often have to apply it manually: {{ .Title | markdownify }}
Those thousands of pages rebuild in about 15 seconds. Of course, that's comparing to a Pentium III running MovableType, so it may not be that impressive. :-)
Aliases so I can trivially preserve 14-year-old permalinks.
/data has all sorts of uses for extending functionality.
When your site is too big for testing with LiveRebuild: hugo server --contentDir samplecontent --theme newversion
Can completely suppress a page type by creating a zero-length template
file, if you can figure out what its name should be (generates a long
string of warnings if you use -v, but it works perfectly and speeds
up rebuild time):
layouts/$section/single.html (no single pages)
layouts/section/$section.html (no list page; with above, only visible
by taxonomy)
Speaking of which, wikiblog.sh creates a bunch of content entries with random author, categories, date, tags, and text from wikipedia (converted to Markdown with pandoc), and can also optionally assign a batch of entries to a series.
It's kind of hilarious to set paginate=2 and hear my fans spin up.
Despite the problems listed above, it only took about two hours to get to a functional site and (unstyled) theme from scratch. Another three hours and I had pagination and all the side/microblogs working, and had figured out how to attach the old comments to their entries.
Once I had a working ugly site, it took about fifteen minutes to convert the example blog style from the Bootstrap distro into templates. And that's counting the time it took to figure out how to use Bootstrap.