Version 4.5 (September 2019)

Last updated on Aug 30, 2021 5 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 v4.5 release of Academic. There are a number of exciting updates in this version that we hope you will like, including:

  • Support for richer results in search engines (see example screenshot below)
  • Commento, a fast, privacy-focused commenting platform is now supported in addition to Disqus
  • Improved the Progressive Web App for mobile devices with a splash screen and your theme colours
    • As an example, view the demo on a mobile device, touch the three dots to access the web browser menu, and then touch Add to Home screen. Instructions will vary slightly depending on browser.
  • More flexible Tag Cloud widget: choose the taxonomy (tags/categories), number of tags, and font size
    • To use, set the new options in your Tag Cloud section - example
Support for richer results in search engines.
Support for richer results in search engines.

Breaking changes

Here are some considerations to make when updating Academic from the previous version, v4.4:

Configuration

To help guide you through the upgrade process, the latest demo configuration can be found at https://github.com/gcushen/hugo-academic/tree/v4.5.0/exampleSite/config/_default .

In your config/_default/params.toml:

Rename the color_theme option to just theme.

Rename the Default theme and/or font set to Minimal if your were previously using the Default theme or font set.

The font set is now specified by themes. Therefore, remove your current font set by setting font = "", unless you wish to override the theme’s font set with one of the other installed font sets or your own (see Customization page in the docs).

Font size is now a site setting rather than a setting within a theme. To change the font size now, font_size can be set to XS, S (small), M (medium), L (large), or XL after your font setting in params.toml. For example, font_size = "L" (the default size).

Add to the bottom of config/_default/params.toml:

# Comments.
[comments]
  # Comment provider:
  #   0: Disabled
  #   1: Disqus (https://disqus.com)
  #   2: Commento (https://commento.io)
  engine = 0

  # Which page types are commentable?
  commentable = {page = true, post = true, docs = true}

  # Configuration of Disqus.
  [comments.disqus]
    shortname = ""  # Paste the shortname from your Disqus dashboard.
    show_count = true  # Show comment count in page header? (true/false)

Editable in config/_default/params.toml can now be set to allow visitors to edit more page types - Page and Post have been added:

edit_page = {repo_url = "https://github.com/<USERNAME>/<REPO>", repo_branch = "master", editable = {docs = true, page = false, post = false}}

Change the [outputs] section in your config/_default/config.toml from:

[outputs]
  home = [ "HTML", "RSS", "JSON" ]
  section = [ "HTML", "RSS" ]

to

[outputs]
  home = [ "HTML", "RSS", "JSON", "WebAppManifest" ]
  section = [ "HTML", "RSS" ]

[mediaTypes."application/manifest+json"]
  suffixes = ["webmanifest"]

[outputFormats.WebAppManifest]
  mediaType = "application/manifest+json"
  rel = "manifest"

Site Icon:

If overriding icon.png, rename it to icon-32.png and add a 512x512px sized image named icon-512.png. Hence, you will have icon-32.png (32x32px), icon-192.png (192x192px), and icon-512.png (512x512px). Hence, different devices and screen sizes are better supported.

Improvements to page front matter for pages, posts, and docs page types:

  • To override the global setting to enable or disable commenting on a page: commentable: true
  • To override the global setting to enable or disable editing of a page: editable: true

Changes to how contact details are stored

If you are using the Contact widget, then the contact structure in config/_default/params.toml must be upgraded:

Convert the address field into semantic parts:

  • address = "" becomes address = {street = "450 Serra Mall", city = "Stanford", region = "CA", postcode = "94305", country = "United States", country_code = "US"}

Latitude and longitude have moved under the coordinates option:

  • E.g. coordinates = {latitude = "37.4275", longitude = "-122.1697"}

Map settings have moved under the new [map] section at the end of params.toml:

[map]
  # To show your address on a map in the Contact widget, enter your latitude and longitude (above)
  # and choose a map provider below.
  #
  # To use Google Maps, set `engine` to 1 and enter your API key that can be obtained here:
  #   https://developers.google.com/maps/documentation/javascript/get-api-key
  # To use OpenStreetMap tiles, set `engine` to 2.
  # To use OpenStreetMap on a high traffic site, set `engine` to 3 and enter your API key that can be obtained here:
  #   https://www.mapbox.com/studio/account/tokens
  #
  # Map provider:
  #   0: No map
  #   1: Google Maps
  #   2: OpenStreetMap (Mapnik)
  #   3: OpenStreetMap (Mapbox)
  engine = 2
  api_key = ""
  zoom = 15

Office hours can now be specified more simply, as a list:

  • office_hours = ["Monday 10:00 to 13:00", "Wednesday 09:00 to 10:00"]

Misc

  • style: fix aside to appear same as alert
    • To try, set markup: mmark in front matter and add A> Some text to a Markdown file’s body
  • feat(shortcode): enable figure lightbox by default - hover your mouse over a figure to enlarge it
  • feat: add Xing option to Page Sharer
  • feat: add image to RSS feed
  • refactor: renamed edit_page.html to page_edit.html
  • feat: add git branch option for editing pages
  • style: fix category icon and language icon spacing when Hugo’s --minify is used
  • fix: HTML of author page when there is no authored content
  • added optional list_delimiter option to params.toml for formatting addresses

Language Packs

  • Updated German, Russian

Thank you

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

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