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Congo
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Configuration

10 mins·

Congo is a highly customisable theme and uses some of the latest Hugo features to simplify how it is configured.

The theme ships with a default configuration that gets you up and running with a basic blog or static website.

Configuration files bundled with the theme are provided in TOML format as this is the default Hugo syntax. Feel free to convert your config to YAML or JSON if you wish.

The default theme configuration is documented in each file so you can freely adjust the settings to meet your needs.

As outlined in the installation instructions, you should adjust your theme configuration by modifying the files in the config/_default/ folder of your Hugo project and delete the config.toml file in your project root.

Site configuration #

Standard Hugo configuration variables are respected throughout the theme, however there are some specific things that should be configured for the best experience.

The site configuration is managed through the config/_default/config.toml file. The table below outlines all the settings that the Congo takes advantage of.

Note that the variable names provided in this table use dot notation to simplify the TOML data structure (ie. outputs.home refers to [outputs] home).

Name Default Description
theme "congo" When using Hugo Modules this config value should be removed. For all other installation types, this must be set to congo for the theme to function.
baseURL Not set The URL to the root of the website.
defaultContentLanguage "en" This value determines the default language of theme components and content. Refer to the language and i18n section below for supported language codes.
enableRobotsTXT true When enabled, a robots.txt file will be created in the site root that allows search engines to crawl the entire site. If you prefer to provide your own pre-made robots.txt, set to false and place your file in the static directory. For complete control, you may provide a custom layout to generate this file.
paginate 10 The number of articles listed on each page of the article listing.
summaryLength 0 The number of words that are used to generate the article summary when one is not provided in the front matter. A value of 0 will use the first sentence. This value has no effect when summaries are hidden.
outputs.home ["HTML", "RSS", "JSON"] The output formats that are generated for the site. Congo requires HTML, RSS and JSON for all theme components to work correctly.
permalinks Not set Refer to the Hugo docs for permalink configuration.
taxonomies Not set Refer to the Organising content section for taxonomy configuration.

Language and i18n #

Congo is optimised for full multilingual websites and theme assets are translated into several languages out of the box. The language configuration allows you to generate multiple versions of your content to provide a customised experience to your visitors in their native language.

The theme currently supports the following languages by default:

Language Code
🇬🇧 English en
🇧🇩 Bengali bn
🇨🇳 Chinese zh
🇫🇮 Finnish fi
🇫🇷 French fr
🇩🇪 German de
🇮🇱 Hebrew he
🇭🇺 Hungarian hu
🇮🇹 Italian it
🇧🇷 Portuguese (Brazil) pt-br
🇵🇹 Portuguese (Portugal) pt-pt
🇷🇴 Romanian ro
🇪🇸 Spanish (Spain) es
🇹🇷 Turkish tr

The default translations can be overridden by creating a custom file in i18n/[code].yaml that contains the translation strings. You can also use this method to add new languages. If you’d like to share a new translation with the community, please open a pull request.

Configuration #

In order to be as flexible as possible, a language configuration file needs to be created for each language on the website. By default Congo includes an English language configuration at config/_default/languages.en.toml.

The default file can be used as a template to create additional languages, or renamed if you wish to author your website in a language other than English. Simply name the file using the format languages.[language-code].toml.

Note: Ensure the defaultContentLanguage parameter in the site configuration matches the language code in your language config filename.
Name Default Description
languageCode "en" The Hugo language code for this file. It can be a top-level language (ie. en) or a sub-variant (ie. en-au) and should match the language code in the filename. Hugo expects this value to always be in lowercase. For proper HTML compliance, set the isoCode parameter which is case-sensitive.
languageName "English" The name of the language.
displayName "EN" The name used when the language appears on the website.
isoCode "en" The ISO language code for HTML metadata purposes. It can be a top-level language (ie. en) or a sub-variant (ie. en-AU).
weight 1 The weight determines the order of languages when building multilingual sites.
rtl false Whether or not this is a RTL language. Set to true to reflow content from right-to-left. Congo fully supports using RTL and LTR languages at the same time and will dynamically adjust to both.
dateFormat "2 January 2006" How dates are formatted in this language. Refer to the Hugo docs for acceptable formats.
title "Congo" The title of the website. This will be displayed in the site header and footer.
description Not set The website description. This will be used in the site metadata.
copyright Not set A Markdown string containing the copyright message to be displayed in the site footer. If none is provided, Congo will automatically generate a copyright string using the site title.
author.name Not set The author’s name. This will be displayed in article footers, and on the homepage when the profile layout is used.
author.image Not set Path to the image file of the author. The image should be a 1:1 aspect ratio and placed in the site’s assets/ folder.
author.headline Not set A Markdown string containing the author’s headline. It will be displayed on the profile homepage under the author’s name.
author.bio Not set A Markdown string containing the author’s bio. It will be displayed in article footers.
author.links Not set The links to display alongside the author’s details. The config file contains example links which can simply be uncommented to enable. The order that the links are displayed is determined by the order they appear in the array. Custom links can be added by providing corresponding SVG icon assets in assets/icons/.

Congo also supports language-specific menu configurations. Menu config files follow the same naming format as the languages file. Simply provide the language code in the file name to tell Hugo which language the file relates to.

Menu config files are named with the format menus.[language-code].toml. Always ensure that the language code used in the menus configuration matches the languages configuration.

The Getting Started section explains more about the structure of this file. You can also refer to the Hugo menu docs for more configuration examples.

Theme parameters #

Congo provides a large number of configuration parameters that control how the theme functions. The table below outlines every available parameter in the config/_default/params.toml file.

Many of the article defaults here can be overridden on a per article basis by specifying it in the front matter. Refer to the Front Matter section for further details.

Name Default Description
colorScheme "congo" The theme colour scheme to use. Valid values are congo (default), avocado, ocean, fire and slate. Refer to the Colour Schemes section for more details.
defaultAppearance "light" The default theme appearance, either light or dark.
autoSwitchAppearance true Whether the theme appearance automatically switches based upon the visitor’s operating system preference. Set to false to force the site to always use the defaultAppearance.
showAppearanceSwitcher false Whether or not to show the appearance switcher in the site footer. The browser’s local storage is used to persist the visitor’s preference.
enableSearch false Whether site search is enabled. Set to true to enable search functionality. Note that the search feature depends on the outputs.home setting in the site configuration being set correctly.
enableCodeCopy false Whether copy-to-clipboard buttons are enabled for <code> blocks. The highlight.noClasses parameter must be set to false for code copy to function correctly. Read more about other configuration files below.
logo Not set The relative path to the site logo file within the assets/ folder. The logo file should be provided at 2x resolution and supports any image dimensions.
mainSections Not set The sections that should be displayed in the recent articles list. If not provided the section with the greatest number of articles is used.
robots Not set String that indicates how robots should handle your site. If set, it will be output in the page head. Refer to Google’s docs for valid values.
showScrollToTop true When set to true the scroll to top arrow is displayed.
homepage.layout "page" The layout of the homepage. Valid values are page, profile or custom. When set to custom, you must provide your own layout by creating a /layouts/partials/home/custom.html file. Refer to the Homepage Layout section for more details.
homepage.showRecent false Whether or not to display the recent articles list on the homepage.
article.showDate true Whether or not article dates are displayed.
article.showDateUpdated false Whether or not the dates articles were updated are displayed.
article.showAuthor true Whether or not the author box is displayed in the article footer.
article.showBreadcrumbs false Whether or not breadcrumbs are displayed in the article header.
article.showDraftLabel true Whether or not the draft indicator is shown next to articles when site is built with --buildDrafts.
article.showEdit false Whether or not the link to edit the article content should be displayed.
article.editURL Not set When article.showEdit is active, the URL for the edit link.
article.editAppendPath true When article.showEdit is active, whether or not the path to the current article should be appended to the URL set at article.editURL.
article.showHeadingAnchors true Whether or not heading anchor links are displayed alongside headings within articles.
article.showPagination true Whether or not the next/previous article links are displayed in the article footer.
article.invertPagination false Whether or not to flip the direction of the next/previous article links.
article.showReadingTime true Whether or not article reading times are displayed.
article.showTableOfContents false Whether or not the table of contents is displayed on articles.
article.showTaxonomies false Whether or not the taxonomies related to this article are displayed.
article.showWordCount false Whether or not article word counts are displayed.
article.sharingLinks Not set Which sharing links to display at the end of each article. When not provided, or set to false no links will be displayed.
list.showBreadcrumbs false Whether or not breadcrumbs are displayed in the header on list pages.
list.showTableOfContents false Whether or not the table of contents is displayed on list pages.
list.showSummary false Whether or not article summaries are displayed on list pages. If a summary is not provided in the front matter, one will be auto generated using the summaryLength parameter in the site configuration.
list.groupByYear true Whether or not articles are grouped by year on list pages.
sitemap.excludedKinds ["taxonomy", "term"] Kinds of content that should be excluded from the generated /sitemap.xml file. Refer to the Hugo docs for acceptable values.
taxonomy.showTermCount true Whether or not the number of articles within a taxonomy term is displayed on the taxonomy listing.
fathomAnalytics.site Not set The site code generated by Fathom Analytics for the website. Refer to the Analytics docs for more details.
fathomAnalytics.domain Not set If using a custom domain with Fathom Analytics, provide it here to serve script.js from the custom domain.
verification.google Not set The site verification string provided by Google to be included in the site metadata.
verification.bing Not set The site verification string provided by Bing to be included in the site metadata.
verification.pinterest Not set The site verification string provided by Pinterest to be included in the site metadata.
verification.yandex Not set The site verification string provided by Yandex to be included in the site metadata.

Other configuration files #

The theme also includes a markup.toml configuration file. This file contains some important parameters that ensure that Hugo is correctly configured to generate sites built with Congo.

Always ensure this file is present in the config directory and that the required values are set. Failure to do so may cause certain features to fucntion incorrectly and could result in unintended behaviour.