Section Page Templates

Add Content and Front Matter to Section Templates

To effectively leverage section page 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

The lookup order for section templates is as follows:

1. /layouts/section/<SECTION>.html
2. /layouts/<SECTION>/list.html
3. /layouts/_default/section.html
4. /layouts/_default/list.html
5. /themes/<THEME>/layouts/section/<SECTION>.html
6. /themes/<THEME>/layouts/<SECTION>/list.html
7. /themes/<THEME>/layouts/_default/section.html
8. /themes/<THEME>/layouts/_default/list.html

.Site.GetPage with Sections

Every Page in Hugo has a .Kind attribute. Kind can easily be combined with the where function in your templates to create kind-specific lists of content. This method is ideal for creating lists, but there are times where you may want to fetch just the index page of a single section via the section’s path.

The .GetPage function looks up an index page of a given Kind and path.

You can call .Site.GetPage with two arguments: kind and kind value.

These are the valid values for ‘kind’:

1. home
2. section
3. taxonomy
4. taxonomyTerm

Example: Creating a Default Section Template

{{ define "main" }}
  <main>
      {{ .Content }}
          <ul class="contents">
          {{ range .Paginator.Pages }}
              <li>{{.Title}}
                  <div>
                    {{ partial "summary.html" . }}
                  </div>
              </li>
          {{ end }}
          </ul>
      {{ partial "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" in the front matter
    │   ├── post-1.md
    │   ├── post-2.md
    │   └── post-3.md
    └── events #Note there is no _index.md file in "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 "section" "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 "section" "events" }}{{ .Title }}{{ end }}</h1>

Which then returns the following:

<h1>Events</h1>