If you are reading this post, you might already be wondering what theme I use. It is not a secret. I use Hugo-PaperMod for this blog. It is a minimalistic looking theme which just so happens to be pretty feature rich at the same time.

Hugo-PaperMod offers you three modes in which you can display the landing page of your blog.

  1. Regular Mode
  2. Home Info Mode
  3. Profile Mode

I appreciate these modes as they are. But I wanted something different. If you have seen my landing page, you already know where I am going with this.

I wanted a hybrid of the Home Info and the Profile Modes. I am seriously wondering why that isn’t an option by default. But maybe it is not everyone’s cup of tea.

Overriding an existing mode

I looked at the Hugo-PaperMod project, which I have installed as a git submodule to my blog’s repository. I instantly had an idea.

In Hugo, if you want to override a template, you create a copy of that template from the theme in your local website’s layouts/partials and make your modifications there.

What did I want?

I wanted a landing page where I had what people would see if they landed on the blog in Profile Mode, but also be able to view the latest 10 posts. Thus it would look like Profile Mode and Home Info mode were joined together.

The rest isn’t rocket science but for those who are totally new to Hugo and themes and things, I thought it might be useful to spell it out and give direction.

PaperMod has home_info.html] displays the posts. index_profile.html on the other hand, displays an image, some social icons and buttons of your choice.

What did I do?

All I had to do was marry them two together in the order I wanted them in. The following gist is what I did for your reference:

Why not introduce a new mode in the theme?

That’s going to be a bit of a wait involving the following steps:

  1. Fork Hugo-PaperMod
  2. Make the necessary changes to the core theme to introduce a new mode
  3. Create a pull request to upstream and wait for maintainers to respond

I’d be spending a lot of time and waiting for them to get back to me, which for me, is less of a priority than getting my blog sorted. However, I do intend to do this when I have some extra time at hand.

Summary

I hope that helped. Have fun modifying your hugo landing page.