Ryder is intentionally barebones — practical defaults, no bloat. Drop it in and start writing.
If you want to have wide features, they will get stacked at the top and will take 2 columns. This is done by setting a front matter param homeFeatureWide to enable it, and adding an order-first class and col-span-2 class to the outer div.
Ryder ships with a full-stack SEO and GEO implementation out of the box — no plugins, no extra config required. Every page gets the right structured data automatically.
Control the header image, footer background, card colors, and border accents — all from your hugo.toml without touching theme files.
The ingredient and step data lives entirely in front matter. The shortcodes read it and render it — no repeated data in the body. This keeps your content clean and makes the structured data for search engines automatic.
The built-in TOC is useful on pages with real hierarchy. It works best when the content has more than a flat list of ## headings and gives the reader a clear path through the page.
Ryder ships with a hidden-home layout for times when you want to put a simple maintenance or coming-soon screen in front of your site without building a separate template. It gives you:
The example page for this layout now lives at /maintenance-page/.
CTA Buttons Take you places!C.T.A. buttons now take on the characteristic of the category style
The Ryder theme supports two logo styles: a text mark (the default) and a custom image. Both are configured entirely in hugo.toml — no template edits required.
You can now set params in your hugo.toml file to keep any pesky pages off your homepage that you may not wish to promote for whatever reason.
Two shortcodes for Amazon affiliate links: a single-product buy button and an interactive ASIN link builder.
The theme uses Font Awesome with tree-shaking — only the icons explicitly imported in assets/js/main.js are included in the JavaScript bundle. If you use an icon class in front matter or a template and it hasn’t been imported, Font Awesome renders a warning placeholder icon instead.
Embed YouTube, Vimeo, and SoundCloud with shortcodes. Video and iframe embeds require one CSP config line — SoundCloud loads via Hugo’s asset pipeline and needs no extra config.
Hugo automatically generates list pages for every taxonomy term — every category and tag gets its own URL. By default these pages just show a list of matching posts, but you can customize them fully by creating an _index.md file for any term.
This page is an example. It lives at content/categories/maps/_index.md and controls everything you see here: the title, header color, card colors, and this description.
If you put a lot of code sample in your projects this will simplify things by using the new content-adaptors feature to display code directly from github.
Adding a map to your hugo website becomes easy with the leaflet shortcode. You can add a box to display the lat and long as well through the use of the lat-long-box shortcode.
Written in Go, Hugo is an open source static site generator available under the Apache Licence 2.0. Hugo supports TOML, YAML and JSON data file types, Markdown and HTML content files and uses shortcodes to add rich content. Other notable features are taxonomies, multilingual mode, image processing, custom output formats, HTML/CSS/JS minification and support for Sass SCSS workflows.
This example page uses the hidden-home layout to put a calm full-screen cover in front of the rest of your site while you work on changes. Add a file named static/images/hidden-home-cover.webp in your site to replace the default background image.
Ryder was my Italian Mastiff / Rhodesian Ridgeback dog. He was a good boy. He passed away in 2018, and this theme is dedicated to him.
Ryder is an open source Hugo theme built and maintained by Ben Strawbridge, a project of Arts-Link.
Arts-Link is a small creative studio building digital tools and sites for writers, artists, bands, and independent publishers. Ryder is the theme powering many of those sites — and now it’s available for anyone to use.
View on GitHubA list of all your content under docs will go here on this paginated section. If you only want to show the docs, just have no content on the _index.md file, or remove it completely if you don’t need to set any front matter variables.
Make your content stand out
This article offers a sample of basic Markdown syntax that can be used in Hugo content files, also it shows whether basic HTML elements are decorated with CSS in a Hugo theme.