Section templates

Add content and front matter to section templates

To effectively leverage section templates, you should first understand Hugo’s content organization and, specifically, the purpose of _index.md for adding content and front matter to section and other list pages.

Section template lookup order

See Template Lookup.

Example: creating a default section template

{{ define "main" }}
  <main>
    {{ .Content }}

    {{ $pages := where site.RegularPages "Type" "posts" }}
    {{ $paginator := .Paginate $pages }}

    {{ range $paginator.Pages }}
      <h2><a href="{{ .RelPermalink }}">{{ .LinkTitle }}</a></h2>
    {{ end }}

    {{ template "_internal/pagination.html" . }}
  </main>
{{ end }}

Example: using .Site.GetPage

The .Site.GetPage example that follows assumes the following project directory structure:

.
└── content
    ├── blog
    │   ├── _index.md   <-- title: My Hugo Blog
    │   ├── post-1.md
    │   ├── post-2.md
    │   └── post-3.md
    └── events
        ├── event-1.md
        └── event-2.md

.Site.GetPage will return nil if no _index.md page is found. Therefore, if content/blog/_index.md does not exist, the template will output the section name:

<h1>{{ with .Site.GetPage "/blog" }}{{ .Title }}{{ end }}</h1>

Since blog has a section index page with front matter at content/blog/_index.md, the above code will return the following result:

<h1>My Hugo Blog</h1>

If we try the same code with the events section, however, Hugo will default to the section title because there is no content/events/_index.md from which to pull content and front matter:

<h1>{{ with .Site.GetPage "/events" }}{{ .Title }}{{ end }}</h1>

Which then returns the following:

<h1>Events</h1>