Getting Started

The config files that ship with Blowfish contain all of the possible settings that the theme recognises. By default, many of these are commented out but you can simply uncomment them to activate or change a specific feature.

Basic configuration #

Before creating any content, there are a few things you should set for a new installation. Starting in the config.toml file, set the baseURL and languageCode parameters. The languageCode should be set to the main language that you will be using to author your content.

# config/_default/config.toml

baseURL = "https://your_domain.com/"
languageCode = "en"

The next step is to configure the language settings. Although Blowfish supports multilingual setups, for now, just configure the main language.

Locate the languages.en.toml file in the config folder. If your main language is English you can use this file as is. Otherwise, rename it so that it includes the correct language code in the filename. For example, for French, rename the file to languages.fr.toml.

# config/_default/languages.en.toml

title = "My awesome website"

[author]
name = "My name"
image = "img/author.jpg"
headline = "A generally awesome human"
bio = "A little bit about me"
links = [
  { twitter = "https://twitter.com/username" }
]

The [author] configuration determines how the author information is displayed on the website. The image should be placed in the site’s assets/ folder. Links will be displayed in the order they are listed.

If you need extra detail, further information about each of these configuration options, is covered in the section.

Colour schemes #

Blowfish ships with a number of colour schemes out of the box. To change the scheme, simply set the colorScheme theme parameter. Valid options are blowfish (default), avocado, fire, ocean and slate.

# config/_default/params.toml

colorScheme = "blowfish"

Blowfish defines a three-colour palette that is used throughout the theme. Each main colour contains ten shades which are based upon the colours that are included in

Blowfish (default) #

Avocado #

Fire #

Forest #

Princess #

Neon #

Bloody #

Terminal #

Marvel #

Noir #

Autumn #

Congo #

Slate #

Although these are the default schemes, you can also create your own. Refer to the

Organising content #

By default, Blowfish doesn’t force you to use a particular content type. In doing so you are free to define your content as you wish. You might prefer pages for a static site, posts for a blog, or projects for a portfolio.

Here’s a quick overview of a basic Blowfish project. All content is placed within the content folder:

.
├── assets
│   └── img
│       └── author.jpg
├── config
│   └── _default
├── content
│   ├── _index.md
│   ├── about.md
│   └── posts
│       ├── _index.md
│       ├── first-post.md
│       └── another-post
│           ├── aardvark.jpg
│           └── index.md
└── themes
    └── blowfish

It’s important to have a firm grasp of how Hugo expects content to be organised as the theme is designed to take full advantage of Hugo page bundles. Be sure to read the for more information.

Blowfish is also flexible when it comes to taxonomies. Some people prefer to use tags and categories to group their content, others prefer to use topics.

Hugo defaults to using posts, tags and categories out of the box and this will work fine if that’s what you want. If you wish to customise this, however, you can do so by creating a taxonomies.toml configuration file:

# config/_default/taxonomies.toml

topic = "topics"