Cactus Theme

Cactus is a minimalistic theme for bloggers based on the default theme of the same-named Cactus static site generator written in Python and Nick Balestra's Jekyll port. Noteworthy features of this Hugo theme are the integration of a comment-system powered by Disqus, a customizable about page, support for RSS feeds, syntax highlighting for source code and sharing options for blog posts.

Installation

Inside the folder of your Hugo site run:

$ cd themes
$ git clone https://github.com/digitalcraftsman/hugo-cactus-theme.git

For more information read the official setup guide of Hugo.

The config file

Take a look inside the exampleSite folder of this theme. You'll find a file called config.toml.

To use it, copy the config.toml in the root folder of your Hugo site. Feel free to change strings as you like to customize your website.

Make sure to update the themesDir property in the config file to point to your site's theme folder otherwise an error will be thrown indicating the themes folder is unable to be found.

About page

Use the about page to introduce yourself to your visitors. You can customize the content as you like in the config.toml. Furthermore, you should replace the avatar placeholder with a great image of yourself.

Hide pages

Pages can be hidden and don't appear in the post list on the homepage if you add the variable hidden = true to the frontmatter. This allows you to link from elsewhere, i.e. just the menu.

Disqus

This theme features a comment system powered by Disqus too. Just add your Disqus-shortname to the config.toml and let readers respond to your blog posts.

Social link icons

You can add a social link panel in the footer by adding entries to the social block in the config.toml. You can choose between two icon fonts:

• Font awesome or
• Mono social icons

Assign either font-awesome or mono-social to the iconFont variable. The Mono social icons offer three styles of icons: -circle, rounded, or default (empty).

Nearly finished

In order to see your site in action, run Hugo's built-in local server.

$ hugo server

Now enter localhost:1313 in the address bar of your browser.

Contributing

Did you found a bug or got an idea for a new feature? Feel free to use the issue tracker to let me know. Or make directly a pull request.

Please create a separate branch for your pull request.

License

This theme is released under the MIT license. For more information read the license.

Acknowledgements

Thanks to

• Nick Balestra for creating the original theme
• Steve Francia for creating Hugo and the awesome community around the project.