Playing with Front Matter

For those who want to use Hugo, but find post creation and management complicated there is a FrontMatter plugin that should help. This is a plugin that makes it easy to create new posts in the category of your choice. It automatically creates the title, description field, that you need to populate, date, preview, draft status, tags and categories. It displays each post as a block and you can see within seconds whether a post is published, or just a draft.

Server Spin Up

If you want to check how the page that you’re working on works you can spin up an instance and every time you stop typing the layout will be updated to show your changes. It’s quick and easy to use. Instead of remembering the commands to spin up an instance, close it and more, the plugin does that.

File Managment is Great

Although your old file names,from importing to Markdown from WordPress might be a mess, every new post is called year-month-date-title. This means that as you write new posts they are ordered in chronological order. Finding the most recent posts is quick and easy.

The Draw Back

The key draw back that I have come across so far, is that algough it plays very well with markdown, it ignores html files. This limits the app to people creating markdown sites, rather than HTML ones. This is a shame, since I really wanted to use it for my static site, rather than just this blog.

Within VS Code

The App runs within VS Code so you get all of the plugins and functionality that you are used to, within VS Code. If you are used to using VIM and commands this interface is much easier, for those unfamiliar with VS Code. It’s quick, it’s efficient, it’s clean. You need to spin up the server to see a preview of the page you’re working on.

Intuitive

This is a quick and intuitive way to write content for a Hugo website, without the need for a website running a CMS. It requires a shorter learning curve than my previous workflow.

Tagging

The Plugin generates a json file and within this file it keeps a collection of all the tags that you have used. When you create a page you can then type a few characters and choose the relevant tags. This helps keep tags consistent. When tagging it’s easy to write “Switzerland” in one place, and “switzerland” in another. By keeping track of all tags you can avoid having too many similar tags. Each tag is a page, so duplicate tags split the results page in two.

Just the Surface

I have only skimmed the surface, for now. I eill explore and learn more about how to use FrontMatter.