Version 3 (October 2018)

Release Notes tell you what’s new in Academic. As always, we welcome your feedback. You can also file a bug report. Want to update to this version? Refer to the update guide in conjunction with the parameter changes mentioned in the Breaking Changes section below.

See what’s new in Academic!

Welcome to the October 2018 release of Academic. This month, we celebrate the massive milestone release of version 3 which brings many new exciting features and improvements to Academic, including:

• New Academic Admin tool to automatically import publications from the open BibTeX format or import third-party assets to generate an offline site - star Academic Admin on GitHub
• New 3-in-1 slides feature - View Slides Demo
  • Slides can be created very efficiently using Markdown, presented to your audience, and shared on your site. Speaker notes included!
• New docs layout for online courses, tutorials, software documentation, and knowledge bases etc.
  • This website is using the new docs layout for the purpose of documenting Academic
• New experience widget - showcase your professional experience
• New responsive featured image system with automatic resizing - simply drag an image named featured.* to a page’s own folder to add a featured image to a page
• New streaming layout for widgets - display a brief summary and thumbnail of each item
• New Apogee and Cupcake themes (see below)
• Show an author profile at the bottom of page content such as posts
• Foundational multi-user support to enable adding multiple authors to pages
• Ability to display a contact form in the contact widget
• Migration to Hugo’s new page bundles - each page gets its own folder where assets can be easily drag-and-dropped
  • Use this tool to help automatically migrate your pages to page bundles
• Migration from Font Awesome v4 to v5 - many new icons can now be used for linking to social networks etc.
• Migration from Bootstrap v3 to v4 - mobile-first approach with greatly improved page responsiveness across devices
  • resize your browser window whilst viewing the demo pages to see how pages are optimized for each device’s screen size

Breaking changes

Here are some considerations to make when updating Academic from the previous version, v2.4.0:

• Require Hugo v0.49+
• View config changes in config.toml - scroll down to the changes for the exampleSite/config.toml file
  • apply the config changes to your site’s config.toml (except for customizations such as the demo’s [[menu.main]] menu)
• Migrate icon pack names and icon names to Font Awesome v5 (for brands, use fab icon pack, otherwise fas icon pack for general icons)
  • Update icons in your [[social]] instances in config.toml
• The image = "" and image_preview = "" parameters have been deprecated and should be removed from page front matter (these were mainly used in publication front matter).
  • If they exist in your site and are not removed, an error may be displayed referencing <$page.Params.image.f...>
• Refactor a page named X.md to content/<section>/X/index.md to use the new page bundles and featured image system
  • E.g. a post content/post/X.md is converted to content/post/X/index.md
• Talks and publications: internal url_* links are now relative to their directory (such as their page bundle)
  • If you have url_* links pointing to internal resources on your site, their path may need adjusting to be relative to their directory rather than relative to the website root

Content pages

• Automatic generation of cite and PDF links: drag and drop a *.bib and a PDF named after your publication’s own folder (page bundle) to your publication’s own folder
• New docs layout for online courses, tutorials, software documentation, and knowledge bases etc.
  • This website is using the new docs layout for the purpose of documenting Academic
• Multi-user support
  • Ability to add multiple authors for blog posts
• Publication: Add optional DOI link using new doi option
• Talks and publications: make internal url_ links relative to their page bundle
• The following boolean (true/false) options can be added in the front matter of pages to control page features:
  • share
  • comments
  • reading_time
  • profile

Themes

• New Apogee and Cupcake themes
• Accessibility: Increase contrast

Widgets

• New experience widget - showcase your professional experience
• add optional contact form to contact widget
  • to use, update, copy the new contact widget from themes/academic/exampleSite/content/home/contact.md and set the email form provider in its front matter
• featurette widget: Add support for title and subtitle
• project widget: Fix filter for case where tag is not CSS class name
• about widget: Fix avatar not showing in some cases
• project widget: Make filter toolbar responsive when large number of buttons

Shortcodes

• Update figure and video to support files within page dir
  • To reference file in page folder, simply use {{< figure src="a.png" >}}
  • To reference file from static/img/ media library, set library=1 in shortcode. E.g. {{< figure src="a.png" library=1 >}}

Language packs

• Add Japanese translation (#654)
• Add Catalan translation (#676)
• Update Chinese translation (#717)
• Update Italian translation (#685)
• Add missing German translations (#739)

Other

• Config: support custom site description and thumbnail image for SEO and sharing on social networks
• Refactor most absolute URLs to relative URLs
• posts: Make using content template (e.g. hugo new) optional
• Fix Google Fonts URL (fix encoding and its HTML attribute)
• Accessibility: Add alt tag to avatar image

Thank you

Last but certainly not least, a big Thank You to all the folks that helped to make Academic even better.

Has Academic helped you? Consider supporting Academic.