ref: 30e804eee5223653ab4c6a2f5dabe6453949ca7d
parent: 82fdfa2c722cc89d47ffba8fa3d4bbef48c24c04
author: spf13 <[email protected]>
date: Thu Feb 20 14:03:37 EST 2014
Adding an introduction to Hugo
--- /dev/null
+++ b/docs/content/overview/introduction.md
@@ -1,0 +1,99 @@
+---
+title: "Introduction to Hugo"
+date: "2013-07-01"
+groups: ['gettingStarted']
+linktitle: "Introduction"
+groups_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 & 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 without sacrificing 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, S3
+& Cloudfront and work well with CDNs. Hugo sites run without dependencies
+on expensive run times like Ruby, Python or PHP and without dependencies
+on any databases.
+
+We think of Hugo as the ideal website creation tool. With nearly instant
+built 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:
+
+ * Extremely fast built times (~1ms per page)
+ * Runs on Mac OSX, Linux and Windows
+ * Content written in [Markdown](/content/example)
+ * Easy [installation](/overview/installing)
+ * Straightforward website [organization](/content/organization)
+ * Completely customizable [homepage](/layout/homepage)
+ * Support for different [content types](/content/types)
+ * Support for website [sections](/content/sections)
+ * Completely customizable [urls](/extras/urls)
+ * Render changes [on the fly](/overview/usage) as you develop
+ * Host your site anywhere
+ * Support for disqus comments
+ * Dynamic menu creation
+ * Support for TOML, YAML and JSON in [frontmatter](/content/front-matter)
+ * [permalink](/extras/permalinks) pattern support
+ * [pretty urls](/extras/urls) support
+ * [shortcodes](/extras/shortcodes)
+ * [Aliases](/extras/aliases) (redirects)
+ * Automatic [RSS](/layout/rss) creation
+ * Support for both go and amber templates
+ * Support for [categories](/indexes/category) and tags
+ * Support for configurable [indexes](/indexes/overview) to create your own organization
+ * Syntax [highlighting](/extras/highlighting) powered by pygments
+ * Ability to [sort content](/content/ordering) as you desire
+ * Automatic [table of contents](/extras/toc) generation
+ * Automatic and user defined [summaries](/content/summaries)
+ * ["Minutes to Read"](/layout/variables) functionality
+ * ["Wordcount"](/layout/variables) functionality
+
+## 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 looked at existing static site generators like Jekyll, Middle 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.