Introducing Icarus and it's features

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Lorem

Icarus is a responsive and customizable theme for bloggers. It’s a port of the same-named theme for Hexo made by Ruipeng Zhang. Noteworthy features of this Hugo theme are the integration of a comment-system powered by Disqus, localization (l10n) support, syntax highlighting for source code, optional widgets for the sidebar and a handful shortcodes to make your life easier.

Get the theme

I assume you’ve Git installed. Inside the folder of your Hugo site run

$ mkdir themes
$ cd themes
$ git clone git@github.com:digitalcraftsman/hugo-icarus-theme.git

You should see a folder called hugo-icarus-theme inside the themes directory, that we created a few moments ago. For more information read the official setup guide of Hugo.

Setup

In the next step navigate to the exampleSite folder at themes/hugo-icarus-theme/exampleSite/. It’s structure shoud look similar to this:

exampleSite
├── config.toml
├── content
│   └── post
│       ├── creating-a-new-theme.md
│       ├── go-is-for-lovers.md
│       ├── hugo-is-for-lovers.md
│       ├── introducing-icarus-and-its-features.md
│       ├── linked-post.md
│       └── migrate-from-jekyll.md
├── data
│   └── l10n.toml
└── static
    └── banners
        └── placeholder.png

In order to get your site running, you need to copy config.toml and data/l10n.toml into the root folders.

The config file

Now, let us take a look into the config.toml. Feel free to play around with the settings.

Comments

The opional comment system is powered by Disqus. Enter your shortname to enable the comment section under your posts.

disqusShortname = ""

You can also define the items menu entries as you like. First, let us link a post that you’ve written. We can do this in the frontmatter of the post’s content file by setting menu to main. Take a look at the menu if you want to see a live example.

+++
menu = "main"
+++

Furthermore, we can add entries that don’t link to posts. Back in the config.toml you’ll find a section for the menus:

[[params.menu]]
    before = true
    label  = "Home"
    link   = "/"

Define a label and enter the URL to resource you want to link. With before you can decide wether the link should appear before or after all linked posts in the menu. Home appears before the linked post, Tags and Categories after them (as in the menu above).

Tell me who you’re

Maybe you noticed the profile section on the left. Add your social network accounts to the profile section on the left by entering your username under social. The links to your account will be create automatically.

Widgets

On the right, you can see some useful widgets that you can activate as you like. You can deactivate them under params.widgets:

[params.widgets]
    recent_articles = false
    categories = true
    tags = true
    tag_cloud = true

Localization (l10n)

You don’t blog in english and you want to translate the theme into your native locale? No problem. Take a look in the data folder and you’ll find a file l10n.toml that we’ve copied at the beginning. It contains all strings related to the theme. Just replace the original strings with your own.

Linking thumbnails

After creating a new post you can define a banner by entering the relative path to the image.

banner = "banners/placeholder.png"

This way you can store them either next to the content file or in the static folder.

Mathematical equations

In case you need to display equations you can insert your Latex or MathML code and it works out of the box thanks to MathJax.

\[ z = r \cdot (\sin{\phi} + \cos{\phi} \cdot i) \]

[ z = r \cdot (\sin{\phi} + \cos{\phi} \cdot i) ]

Shortcodes

Last but not least I included some useful shortcodes to make your like easier.

Gallery

This way you can include a gallery into your post. Copy the code below into your content file and enter the relative paths to your images.

{{ < gallery
    "/banners/placeholder.png"
    "/banners/placeholder.png"
    "/banners/placeholder.png"
> }}

Note: In order to prevent the execution of the shortcodes I added a space between {{ and < at the beginning and the end of the shortcode. Revert this after copying.

Github Gists

Enter the id of your gist and you’re ready to go.

{{ <  gist digitalcraftsman 85f59771b5ae1e2091a8 > }}

Note, that this only works with public gists since authentification is not supported.

JSFidde

It works the same with JSFiddle examples you want to showcase. The parameter id consists of the username and id of the example.

{{ < jsfiddle id="zalun/NmudS" > }}



As descibed in the docs of JSFiddle, you can define which tabs will be shown. Enter the tabs you want to see separated by a comma in the tabs parameter.

{{ < jsfiddle id="zalun/NmudS" tabs="html,result" > }}

Do you see the difference?



Vimeo and Youtube

The embedding of videos from Vimeo and Youtube is also supported.

{{ < youtube "w7Ft2ymGmfc" > }}


{{ < vimeo "137643804" > }}

Nearly finished

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

$ hugo server -w

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.

License

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

Annotations

Thanks to Steve Francia for creating Hugo and the awesome community around the project.