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Documentation

DataLeaf is a Hugo theme for technical and long-form writing. These guides cover installation, configuration, technical content, metadata, customization and design tokens, upgrades, and releases.

Start with Installation, then use the Configuration reference to adapt the theme to your site. For production publishing, see Metadata and social previews and Releasing DataLeaf.

  1. Installation

    DataLeaf requires Hugo 0.158.0 or later (standard or Extended edition) and Git. Hugo 0.158 introduced the language locale, label, and direction APIs used by the theme. No Sass pipeline or Extended-only functionality is required. Hugo …

    2 min read

  2. Configuration

    DataLeaf keeps configuration deliberately small. Unset optional parameters fall back to simple defaults. DataLeaf uses Hugo’s mainSections for the home page, archives, and adjacent-article navigation: This is a root configuration setting, …

    9 min read

  3. Technical content

    DataLeaf includes render hooks and shortcodes for technical and scientific writing. Lists, term pages, documentation contents, and search results share one entry: the title, a plain-text summary, and beside them the date, reading time, and …

    7 min read

  4. Metadata and social previews

    DataLeaf emits canonical URLs, standard descriptions, Open Graph metadata, X/Twitter Card metadata, and JSON-LD structured data. For pages, DataLeaf uses this order: page front matter description; the generated page summary; site-level …

    1 min read

  5. Customization

    DataLeaf is designed to be customized without forking the theme. Create static/css/custom.css in your Hugo site: Then configure: Multiple files are supported and loaded in the order listed. DataLeaf is typography-led: reading text and …

    3 min read

  6. Design tokens

    DataLeaf’s visual language is defined by CSS custom properties in the theme’s assets/css/tokens.css. Components use only these tokens, so a site can adjust the design by overriding them in custom CSS without touching component selectors. …

    8 min read

  7. Upgrading

    DataLeaf is still pre-1.0, so upgrades may include template or configuration changes. Fetch the latest theme commit: Then rebuild locally: Commit the updated submodule reference only after the site builds successfully. Update module …

    6 min read

  8. Releasing DataLeaf

    DataLeaf uses a controlled GitLab CI job to create version tags and GitLab releases from reviewed main commits. Before publishing: update CHANGELOG.md; add or update RELEASE_NOTES_<version>.md; verify the merge request pipeline; merge the …

    2 min read

  9. Internationalization

    DataLeaf uses Hugo’s native i18n system for theme-owned interface strings. The theme ships with: A site can override any key by providing its own files under i18n/, including region-specific files such as pt-PT.toml. The theme also mounts …

    5 min read

  10. Quality checks

    DataLeaf validates the generated production site and independent consuming sites. The architecture fixtures exercise empty sites, inferred and explicit main sections, custom taxonomies and permalinks, nested menus, reordered and disabled …

    9 min read

  11. Hugo Themes distribution

    DataLeaf includes a distribution package for the official Hugo Themes directory. The Hugo Themes Site Builder imports each listed theme as a Hugo Module directly from its Git host. It then reads: theme.toml, for the name, description, …

    2 min read