Customizing the homepage with widgets

3 min read

Homepage widgets display as sections on the homepage. They can be enabled/disabled and configured as desired. Academic has the following widgets available to use:

  • About/biography
  • Selected publications
  • Recent publications
  • Recent news/blog posts
  • Projects
  • Selected talks
  • Recent talks
  • Contact
  • Tag cloud
  • Hero (introduction)
  • Custom widget (demonstrated with the teaching example)

The example site that you copied to create your site uses all the different types of widget (except talks), so you can generally just delete the widgets you don’t need and customize the parameters of the widgets you wish to keep.

The parameters for each widget vary. They can be found in the preamble/frontmatter (between the pair of +++) for each widget installed in the content/home/ folder.

By default, publications will be displayed in a simple list. If you prefer a more detailed list with abstract and image, you can enable the detailed publication list on the homepage by setting list_format = 2 in content/home/publications.md.

Add a widget to the homepage

To add a widget manually, copy the relevant widget from themes/academic/exampleSite/content/home/ to your content/home/ folder.

Widget identifiers are set to their respective filenames, so a content/home/about.md widget can be linked from the navigation bar by setting the relevant URL as "#about" in config.toml.

This means that if you want to use multiple instances of a widget, each widget will be assigned a unique ID based on the filename that you set. You can then use that ID for linking, like in the above example.

Using the custom widget

You can use the custom widget to create your own home page sections.

Simply duplicate (copy/paste) and rename the example teaching file at content/home/teaching.md. Then edit the section title, weight (refer to Ordering sections below), and content as desired.

You may also wish to add a navigation link to the top of the page that points to the new section. This can be achieved by adding something similar to the following lines to your config.toml, where the URL will consist of the first title word in lowercase:

[[menu.main]]
    name = "Research"
    url = "#research"
    weight = 10

Remove a widget from the homepage

If you do not require a particular widget, you can simply delete any associated files from the content/home/ folder.

To remove a navigation link from the top of the page, remove the associated [[menu.main]] entry in config.toml.

Ordering widgets

The order that the homepage widgets are displayed in is defined by the weight parameter in each of the files in the content/home/ directory. The widgets are displayed in ascending order of their weight, so you can simply edit the weight parameters as desired.

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