This chapter covers:
- A walk through of Markdown language and content creation using Markdown
- Understanding of Hugo’s extensions to Markdown. These are supported by all Hugo themes.
- Understanding the various markup languages supported by Hugo
- A walk though of YAML as the language used to provide metadata in a Hugo based website.
- An understanding of the various elements of a page’s Front Matter
Hugo supports a variety of markup languages for generating content. Markdown is the most popular amongst them and most widely used. In this chapter we will be formatting the pages we created in the website for Acme Corporation in chapter 2.
So far we have used plain text to fill up content in our web pages. With plain text, we get no structure and a blob of text is not fun to read. Markdown is a lightweight format for writing easy to read and easy to write documents with support for formatting and structuring content using text based constructs. Created in 2004 by John Gruber and Aaron Swartz, Markdown is built with the objective of being human readable. It standardizes on a text based mechanism for specifying formatting and while a compiler and a renderer improves readability, the language is easy to understand without it. This allows usage of markdown anywhere from the command line to git commit messages, README files, plain text boxes and chat pods.