Dream Plus Theme for Hugo

This theme is an upgraded version of the Dream Theme by Yue Yang and contains tons of new features such as:

• "Card" and "Post" views for the home page
• twemoji rendering
• Table of contents for posts
• Random image background
• Disqus
• Sidebar
• Share card below posts
• Device detection, that is whether the client device is a PC or phone.
• About section can be written in MarkDown
• Custom 404 pages can be written in MarkDown
• Custom Favicon
• Custom CSS and JS can be used without modifying the theme
• More social icons
• Shorte.st website script, and a lot of other minor improvements.

This theme can be used for two purposes:

1. If you're making a site which links to other sites and your stuff all around the internet, then you can switch to card view for that. I use this view for my home page here: UtkarshVerma's Site
2. If you're simply making a blog or another website with a bunch of posts, then switch to the post view for that. I use this view for my blog: UtkarshVerma's Blog

Installation

The theme can be installed by running the following commands inside your Hugo website folder.

cd themes
git submodule add https://github.com/UtkarshVerma/hugo-dream-plus dream-plus
git submodule update --init --recursive

Getting Started

Once the theme has been successfully installed, you'll have to do a bit of tuning to the theme to meet your taste.

The config file

Within the exampleSite folder, you'll find the config.toml file which can be used to tweak the theme.

Describe yourself

Define yourself through the following variables:

author = "<name of the author>"
description = "Short description of the site"
motto = "author's motto or short description"
avatar = "<absolute path to avatar>"	//Leaving the avatar variable unset displays svg avatars

After that, fill up the social variables at the end of the config file. This theme suports the following social sites: (The examples are given)

• GitHub - github = "<username>"
• Email - email = "<email id>"
• Twitter - twitter = "<username>"
• Facebook - facebook = "<username>"
• YouTube - youtube = "<username>"
• Medium - medium = "<username>"
• LinkedIn - linkedin = "<username>"
• StackOverflow - stackoverflow = "<username with the user number>"
• CodePen - codepen = "<username>"
• Reddit - reddit = "<username>"

Toggling the views

As stated earlier, this theme has two views, Card view and Post view. To define your desired view, modify the contentType variable as follows:

contentType = "cards"    # Enables the card view.   
contentType = "post"     # Enables the post view.

One clear distinction between both the view is that Card view doesn't support posts, instead it redirects to the specified link, while Post view does. You may test them out yourselves by visiting my sites(stated above) which use them. Also, post/card creation is done differently for both the views. It is as follows:

hugo new cards/example.md		//Card creation
hugo new post/example.md		//Post creation

After this, just open your MarkDown card/post and provide the parameters for the card/post.

Twitter emoji

This theme supports twemoji rendering by default. To enable/disable it, you may set the twitterEmoji config variable to true or false respectively. Regarding the usage, simply use the good 'ol MarkDown syntax for emoji and they'll be rendered as twemoji.

Table of contents (Post view only)

This theme is capable of indexing out the headings into a clean table of contents for bettering browsing through long posts. It can be enabled/disabled by modifying the enableToc config variable accordingly.

Image background

To enable setting images as background, you'll have to disable random colour background first by setting enableColorBG to false. Also, enabling image background feature requires the modification of two variables, namely bgImage and bgList. If you prefer a single image background, then simply set the value of bgImage as the absolute path of your image. For example,

bgImage = "/images/bg1.jpeg"

You can also enable random background feature which switches the background between a provided images list(stored in bgList), every time the site is reloaded. For example,

bgList = ["/images/bg1.jpeg", "/images/bg2.jpeg", "/images/bg3.jpeg"]

You may also add blurring effect to the background image using bgBlur.

Disqus

Disqus comment system may be used alongside this theme. It is enabled/disabled through the disqusShortname config variable. To disable Disqus comments, leave this config variable unset. To enable, simply enter your Disqus shortname as a string. For example,

disqusShortname = "UtkarshVermaBlog"

Share card (Post view only)

This card appears below your posts to allow sharing of your post on Facebook and Twitter. Enable/disable it through the enableShareCard variable by setting appropriate boolean values.

Device detection

You may configure your website based on the client device by using the isMobile JS variable. It is true when the client device is a mobile and vice versa.

Error page and about page

This theme supports total customization of about and error pages. These pages may be customized through the about.md and 404.md files. Once finished customizing, copy them in the /content directory of your Hugo site.

Custom favicon

You may also set a custom favicon for your website using the favicon config variable. For example,

  favicon = "/images/defaultFav.ico"

Importing CSS and JS

You can also manipulate the theme externally using CSS files and JS files and linking them using the customCSS and customJS config list variables. The path should be relative for this. For example,

  customCSS = ["css/blog.css"]
  customJS = ["js/twemoji.js"]

Shorte.st website script

The shorte.st website script has been implemented in this theme. To use it, you'll first have to enable this feature by setting enableShortest to true and then setting the API Token you got from Shorte.st to shortestToken, and after that, define your domains as a list in the shortestDomains config variable.

Some other configurations

There are some other minor configurations as well. You may set them up by referring to the comments inside the config file.

Nearly Finished

After finishing the configurations, you're good to go. So, test your website using:

hugo server

Your site should now be locally available at http://localhost:1313 for testing purposes.

Contributing

Found something interesting to add to this theme or rather a bug? Let me know about it through the issue tracker. Pull requests are also welcome.

License

This theme is released under the MIT license.