What's New in 2.0 ✨

The original aim of Congo was to develop a theme that was simple and lightweight. Version 2 takes this one step further and makes the theme even more powerful while still maintaining its lightweight footprint.

Continue reading below to discover what’s new. When you’re ready to upgrade, check out the guide to upgrading.

Tailwind CSS 3.0 #

Tailwind CSS is at the heart of Congo and this new release contains the very latest Tailwind CSS version 3. It brings with it performance optimisations and support for some great new CSS features.

Implementing this new version has also removed some Tailwind plugin dependencies from the theme, allowing the overall footprint to remain lightweight.

Multilingual support #

A highly requested feature, Congo is now multilingual! If you publish your content in multiple languages, the site will be built with all the translations available.

Thanks to submissions from the community, Congo has already been translated into eight languages with more to be added over time. By the way, pull requests for new languages are always welcome!

RTL language support #

One of the benefits of the new Tailwind and Multilingual features is the ability to add RTL language support. When enabled, the entire site will reflow content from right-to-left. Every element in the theme has been restyled to ensure it looks great in this mode which aids authors who wish to generate content in RTL languages.

RTL is controlled on a per-language basis so you can mix and match both RTL and LTR content in your projects and the theme will respond accordingly.

Automatic image resizing #

A big change in Congo 2.0 is the addition of automatic image resizing. Using the power of Hugo Pipes, images in Markdown content are now automatically scaled to different output sizes. These are then presented using HTML srcset attributes enabling optimised file sizes to be served to your site visitors.

<!-- Markdown: ![My image](image.jpg) -->
<img
  srcset="
    /image_320x0_resize_q75_box.jpg 320w,
    /image_635x0_resize_q75_box.jpg 635w,
    /image_1024x0_resize_q75_box.jpg 1024w,
    /image_1270x0_resize_q75_box.jpg 2x"
  src="/image_635x0_resize_q75_box.jpg"
  alt="My image"
/>

Best of all there’s nothing you need to change! Simply insert standard Markdown image syntax and let the theme do the rest. If you want a little more control, the figure shortcode has been completely rewritten to provide the same resizing benefits.

Performance improvements #

This update packs performance improvements throughout. A key objective for this release was to improve Lighthouse scores and Congo now scores a perfect 100 on all four metrics.

There’s too many individual changes to highlight them here but the results speak for themselves. If you want to dig deeper, you can view the Lighthouse report. Real world performance will vary based upon server configuration.

Site search #

Powered by Fuse.js, site search allows visitors to quickly and easily find your content. All searches are performed client-side meaning there’s nothing to configure on the server and queries are performed super fast. Simply enable the feature in your site configuration and you’re all set. Oh, and it also supports full keyboard navigation!

Tables of contents #

A highly requested feature, Congo now supports tables of contents on article pages. You can see it in action on this page. The contents are fully responsive and will adjust to take advantage of the space available at different screen resolutions.

Available on a global or per article basis, the table of contents can be fully customised using standard Hugo configuration values, allowing you to adjust the behaviour to suit your project.

Accessibility improvements #

From adding ARIA descriptions to more items or simply adjusting the contrast of certain text elements, this release is the most accessible yet.

Version 2 also introduces “skip to content” and “scroll to top” links that enable quick navigation. There’s also keyboard shortcuts for enabling items like search without reaching for the mouse.

The new image resizing features also provide full control over alt and title elements enabling an accessible experience for all visitors.

A whole lot more #

There’s countless other minor changes to explore. From being able to display taxonomies on articles and list pages, to using the new headline author parameter to customise your homepage. There’s also improved JSON-LD strucured data which further optimises SEO performance. Plus the entire theme has had extra polish to ensure a consistent design language.

🚀 Check out the full changelog to learn more.

Next steps #

If you’re ready to upgrade, read the upgrading from version 1 guide to get started. If you’re new to Congo, check out the Installation guide to begin a new project.