Theming strategy?

[shah]

I was curious what the approach should be to translate a theme from Hugo to Lume. Specifically, we built out a Salesforce Lightning Design System (SLDS) based Hugo theme that we'd like to start with but I did not see any theming opinions in the Lume documentation.

How should we go about porting our SLDS Hugo Theme over to Lume? There's nothing special about our theme, it's basically SLDS components make accessible through Hugo and we'd want to do the same thing with Lume.

I get the sense that Lume Layouts is where we'd build our "theme" or is there another strategy that the community suggests?

[oscarotero]

Lume is unopinionated and doesn't have a "standard" theming system. This Hugo theme could be ported by translating the layouts files to nunjucks (or other template system available) and store them in _includes. The other files are just static files so it can be copied as is.

[shah]

Great, that's what I was thinking as well. Although, I would suggest that -- in case you're competing with Hugo, Zola, WordPress, etc. you should definitely consider an opinionated theming approach because that creates a user community faster. Perhaps if you just treat themes as plugins then you'd be able leave the base untouched but allow easy install of themes as plugins.

Hugo a little while started using Go Modules as themes and life has been easier ever since ... every theme is basically a Golang module and a union file system architecture is used to combine content with presentation. Decoupling of themes through modules has been great and worth considering for Lume.