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diff --git a/content/overview/introduction.md b/content/overview/introduction.md new file mode 100644 index 0000000..8f76e4a --- /dev/null +++ b/content/overview/introduction.md @@ -0,0 +1,126 @@ +--- +date: 2013-07-01 +linktitle: Introduction +menu: + main: + parent: getting started +next: /overview/quickstart +title: Introduction to Hugo +weight: 5 +--- + +## What is Hugo? + +Hugo is a general-purpose website framework. Technically speaking, Hugo is +a static site generator. This means that, unlike systems like WordPress, +Ghost and Drupal, which run on your web server expensively building a page +every time a visitor requests one, Hugo does the building when you create +your content. Since websites are viewed far more often then they are +edited, Hugo is optimized for website viewing while providing a great +writing experience. + +Sites built with Hugo are extremely fast and very secure. Hugo sites can +be hosted anywhere, including Heroku, GoDaddy, GitHub Pages, Amazon S3 +and CloudFront, and work well with CDNs. Hugo sites run without dependencies +on expensive runtimes like Ruby, Python or PHP and without dependencies +on any databases. + +We think of Hugo as the ideal website creation tool. With nearly instant +build times and the ability to rebuild whenever a change is made, Hugo +provides a very fast feedback loop. This is essential when you are +designing websites, but also very useful when creating content. + +## What does Hugo do? + +In technical terms, Hugo takes a source directory of Markdown files and +templates and uses these as input to create a complete website. + +Hugo boasts the following features: + +### General + + * Extremely fast build times (~1 ms per page) + * Completely cross platform: Runs on Mac OS X, Linux and Windows + * Easy [installation](/overview/installing) + * Render changes [on the fly](/overview/usage) with [live reload](/extras/livereload) as you develop + * Complete theme support + * Host your site anywhere + +### Organization + + * Straightforward [organization](/content/organization) + * Support for [website sections](/content/sections) + * Completely customizable [URLs](/extras/urls) + * Support for configurable [taxonomies](/indexes/overview) which includes categories and tags. Create your own custom organization of content + * Ability to [sort content](/content/ordering) as you desire + * Automatic [table of contents](/extras/toc) generation + * Dynamic menu creation + * [Pretty URLs](/extras/urls) support + * [Permalink](/extras/permalinks) pattern support + * [Aliases](/extras/aliases) (redirects) + +### Content + + * Content written in [Markdown](/content/example) + * Support for TOML, YAML and JSON metadata in [frontmatter](/content/front-matter) + * Completely [customizable homepage](/layout/homepage) + * Support for multiple [content types](/content/types) + * Automatic and user defined [summaries](/content/summaries) + * [Shortcodes](/extras/shortcodes) to enable rich content inside of Markdown + * ["Minutes to Read"](/layout/variables) functionality + * ["Wordcount"](/layout/variables) functionality + +### Additional Features + + * Integrated Disqus comment support + * Automatic [RSS](/layout/rss) creation + * Support for Go and [Amber](https://github.com/eknkc/amber) templates + * Syntax [highlighting](/extras/highlighting) powered by pygments + +See what's coming next in the [roadmap](/meta/roadmap). + +## Who should use Hugo? + +Hugo is for people that prefer writing in a text editor over +a browser. + +Hugo is for people who want to hand code their own website without +worrying about setting up complicated runtimes, dependencies and +databases. + +Hugo is for people building a blog, company site, portfolio, tumblog, +documentation, single page site or a site with thousands of +pages. + +## Why did you write Hugo? + +I wrote Hugo ultimately for a few reasons. First, I was disappointed with +WordPress, my then website solution. It rendered slowly. I couldn't create +content as efficiently as I wanted to and needed to be online to write +posts. The constant security updates and the horror stories of people's +hacked blogs. I hated how content was written in HTML instead of the much +simpler Markdown. Overall, I felt like it got in my way more than it helped +me from writing great content. + +I looked at existing static site generators like Jekyll, Middleman and nanoc. +All had complicated dependencies to install and took far longer to render +my blog with hundreds of posts than I felt was acceptable. I wanted +a framework to be able to get rapid feedback while making changes to the +templates, and the 5+-minute render times was just too slow. In general, +they were also very blog minded and didn't have the ability to have +different content types and flexible URLs. + +I wanted to develop a fast and full-featured website framework without +dependencies. The Go language seemed to have all of the features I needed +in a language. I began developing Hugo in Go and fell in love with the +language. I hope you will enjoy using (and contributing to) Hugo as much +as I have writing it. + +## Next Steps + + * [Install Hugo](/overview/installing) + * [Quick start](/overview/quickstart) + * [Join the Mailing List](/community/mailing-list) + * [Star us on GitHub](http://github.com/spf13/hugo) + * [Discussion Forum](http://discuss.gohugo.io) + |