Version 4.3 (May 2019)

Last updated on Aug 30, 2021 4 min read

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 v4.3.1 release of Academic. There are a number of exciting updates in this version that we hope you will like, including:

A listing page will be generated for your courses, tutorials, and documentation - view the new demo
- For when you have multiple files using the docs layout which are organized in a parent folder like content/courses/python-101/
- The corresponding example Markdown files can be found here
Active link highlighting in the navigation bar has been extended to work for non-home pages
- Active link highlighting and scrolling to navigation links now works with multiple widget-pages and any other pages such as those using the docs layout - check out the latest demo site to see it in action with the Tutorials page
Slides - if you use code highlighting, the code highlighting style can now be chosen on a per deck basis to match the color theme of your slide deck (see Slides below)
Converted CSS styling to SCSS for tighter integration with Bootstrap and Academic’s theming system
- This refactoring is unlikely to affect any custom CSS in CSS Plugins
Added a search box to the 404 error page so that visitors can easily discover relevant content
Fixes (see below) for author system including author error on Windows and fixes for some tag/category links that were broken by breaking changes in Hugo v0.55

Most front matter snippets in the documentation have recently been converted from TOML to YAML. The example widgets and configuration files remain in TOML format. There is no need to convert any files in your site since Academic and Hugo continue to support both YAML and TOML formats. An online YAML<–>TOML converter is available should you wish to convert your front matter. This change is to make it easier to edit content in popular Markdown editors like Typora and Visual Studio Code.

Breaking changes

Here are some considerations to make when updating Academic from the previous version, v4.2:

Hugo Extended v0.55.6+ is required
Rename the author folder to authors
In config/_default/config.toml, remove "CSS" from the site [outputs] section, yielding:
```
  [outputs]
  home = [ "HTML", "RSS", "JSON" ]
  section = [ "HTML", "RSS" ]
```
If you deploy your site with Netlify, login to Netlify and choose Settings > Build & deploy > Build image selection and choose Ubuntu Xenial 16.04 as the build image. Previous Netlify build images do not fully support all Hugo features.
If using the docs layout, add layout: docs in YAML (or layout = "docs" in TOML) to content/courses/_index.md

Slides

The author of a slide deck can now choose a code highlighting style to match the color theme of the slide deck, if code highlighting is enabled in config/_default/params.toml.

For a light slide deck, consider adding the following to the bottom of your slide front matter:

[slides]
theme = "white"  # Reveal JS theme name
highlight_style = "github"  # Highlight JS theme name

Whereas, for a dark slide deck, consider adding the following to the bottom of your slide front matter:

[slides]
theme = "black"  # Reveal JS theme name
highlight_style = "dracula"  # Highlight JS theme name

Refer to the updated docs for further info.

Publications

refactor publication types as TOML at themes/academic/data/publication_types.toml

Widgets

fix inconsistent column widths in People widget

Shortcodes

fix Gallery shortcode: remove Hugo 0.55+ deprecation warning

Misc

Update HighlightJS from 9.12.0 to 9.15.6 (#1075)
- Adds support for more languages including plaintext and SAS
- See https://github.com/highlightjs/highlight.js/blob/master/CHANGES.md

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? Please consider supporting Academic.