Content View Templates

These alternative content views are especially useful in list templates.

The following are common use cases for content views:

• You want content of every type to be shown on the homepage but only with limited summary views.
• You only want a bulleted list of your content on a taxonomy list page. Views make this very straightforward by delegating the rendering of each different type of content to the content itself.

Create a Content View

To create a new view, create a template in each of your different content type directories with the view name. The following example contains an “li” view and a “summary” view for the post and project content types. As you can see, these sit next to the single content view template, single.html. You can even provide a specific view for a given type and continue to use the _default/single.html for the primary view.

  ▾ layouts/
    ▾ post/
        li.html
        single.html
        summary.html
    ▾ project/
        li.html
        single.html
        summary.html

Hugo also has support for a default content template to be used in the event that a specific content view template has not been provided for that type. Content views can also be defined in the _default directory and will work the same as list and single templates who eventually trickle down to the _default directory as a matter of the lookup order.

▾ layouts/
  ▾ _default/
      li.html
      single.html
      summary.html

Which Template Will be Rendered?

The following is the lookup order for content views:

1. /layouts/<TYPE>/<VIEW>.html
2. /layouts/_default/<VIEW>.html
3. /themes/<THEME>/layouts/<TYPE>/<VIEW>.html
4. /themes/<THEME>/layouts/_default/<VIEW>.html

Example: Content View Inside a List

The following example demonstrates how to use content views inside of your list templates.

list.html

In this example, .Render is passed into the template to call the render function. .Render is a special function that instructs content to render itself with the view template provided as the first argument. In this case, the template is going to render the summary.html view that follows:

<main id="main">
  <div>
  <h1 id="title">{{ .Title }}</h1>
  {{ range .Data.Pages }}
    {{ .Render "summary"}}
  {{ end }}
  </div>
</main>

summary.html

Hugo will pass the entire page object to the following summary.html view template. (See Page Variables for a complete list.)

<article class="post">
  <header>
    <h2><a href='{{ .Permalink }}'> {{ .Title }}</a> </h2>
    <div class="post-meta">{{ .Date.Format "Mon, Jan 2, 2006" }} - {{ .FuzzyWordCount }} Words </div>
  </header>
  {{ .Summary }}
  <footer>
  <a href='{{ .Permalink }}'><nobr>Read more →</nobr></a>
  </footer>
</article>

li.html

Continuing on the previous example, we can change our render function to use a smaller li.html view by changing the argument in the call to the .Render function (i.e., {{ .Render "li" }}).

<li>
  <a href="{{ .Permalink }}">{{ .Title }}</a>
  <div class="meta">{{ .Date.Format "Mon, Jan 2, 2006" }}</div>
</li>