Blogophonic: A Free Hugo Theme for Blogs
Built with Tachyons and bundled with a functional contact form, Blogophonic is Modern, Flexible and easily configurable Hugo blog theme.
Part of the
Themes for Static Site Generators
Series
At Formspree we love static site generators. Our frontsite is built on Hugo, and we’ve made websites with pretty much every major SSG. It’s satisfying to deploy a site and walk away without a care. There’s no ongoing maintenance, no updating. It’s just out there.
However, when we were building the Formspree blog, we struggled to find a good static site theme. It seemed like, to get a professionally designed, feature rich blog, we had to either:
- Design it from scratch, or
- Find a theme, then adapt it to our preferred static site generator or
- Limit our choices to themes built for our SSG.
We wanted all themes to work across all static site generators! We ended up creating our blog from scratch. But in the future, we hope the choice of static site generator won’t limit our design options, or vice versa.
Today we’re taking a small step in that direction. We’re repackaging what we learned from building our blog into a clean, attractive theme that doesn’t skimp on the blogging essentials, and works with several popular SSGs. The first stop on this journey is a theme for Hugo. We call it Blogophonic.
Three Reasons to Use Blogophonic
We think we’ve created a pretty awesome theme. Here are a few of the features that set Blogophonic apart:
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Blogophonic is thoughtfully crafted with features a blog should have: multiple layouts for list and item views - including one with a sidebar; custom sidebar text with a sticky ad container; options to hide byline, dateline, and thumbnail images.
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Styled with Tachyons - What’s Tachyons? Glad you asked! Tachyons is a design system that works particularly well with a modern, generated website. Using it avoids complex cascades, unintended side effects, and brain numbing repetitive CSS while also offering a community library of components. We think it makes customizing a theme incredibly fast.
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Forms built-in - Every website needs a way to engage visitors. Blogophonic comes with a built-in contact form page powered by Formspree. (duh!) That means you don’t need a server or any programming knowledge to make the form work. Just configure the form page and submit once to set it up.
What’s next
Our intent is to have Blogophonic available for several different SSG’s, we started with one of the most popular, Hugo, but we aren’t stopping there. Next we intend to port it to Jekyll, and Gatsby shortly after.
But what about your favorite SSG? You can help. Just fork Blogophonic and port it over to your preferred generator. Let us know what you’ve done and we’ll promote your work here.
Try it out!
To get started, you can view the Demo site, check out the Github repo, or click below to create your own repo using Blogophonic as a template.