Sections

Hugo sites are structured into sections, each section is a separate directory under the content directory in the base Hugo directory.

While Hugo will auto-generate an index page for each section, it is strongly recommended that you write an _index.md page to provide content for the page itself. You should write these in the same way as you write regular pages.

1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8

---
title: "Sections"
date: 2021-01-22
weight: 100
---

Section index pages are also created by writing a markdown (.md) file with a YAML header.

You can add to a section index an auto-generated list of pages within the section, this is done by setting the parameter listpages: true in the YAML header information. If doing this you should include a summary parameter in the individual pages, for example summary: "This is page about creating sections".

The govukhugo scaffold generates a navigation menu in a left-hand sidebar. At the home page level the sidebar will show the site sections, and if present a link to the site’s about page. Once inside a section the sidebar will show the pages within that section.

The ordering of sections in the site navigation is similar to that of pages, sections are ordered by the weight set in their _index.md page and then alphabetically by the title.

Note that responsive web design settings within the site’s CSS collapses the navigation to a “breadcrumbs” style navigation on small screens, therefore it is recommended that the site and section index pages include links to their child content (either manually written or auto-generated).

The default settings of govukhugo assume that below the content directory there is a single layer of directories - further levels can exist but they will not be included in site navigation. Other structures will require writing a custom navigation Hugo template.