Version 5.0 Beta 2 (January 2021)

Last updated on Sep 30, 2021 6 min read

What’s new?

Significantly improved SEO, Accessibility, and Web Best Practices

Key highlights of this release:

Edit content in Wowchemy CMS both locally and online, from your sofa or on the go
- Learn how you can edit content in Wowchemy CMS
Wowchemy CMS now supports all main content types including publications, slide decks, and homepage (common options only)
Significantly improved SEO, Accessibility, and Web Best Practices
- The demo of the light Academic template now achieves 100% Accessibility, 100% Best Practices, and 100% SEO scores
- Hero widget’s image can now be moved from the media library to the widget page folder, e.g. home/, to become responsively sized.
Significantly improved site performance
- A 100% Performance score can be achieved by optimizing a site
- For optimization ideas, check out the new Performance guide
- Unused styles can also now be removed from a site for advanced optimization
Significantly improved default security of sites (from D to B score, and on to A in Beta 3)
- Refer to the new Security guide
- Default security headers, including configurable CSP, added for enhanced security
- To enable, open config.toml and add "headers" to outputs > home
A more practical example of creating an online course using the Academic template
- Check out the mini example online course and the corresponding Markdown which powers it
- Remember to share your courses with the community in #showcase-your-site and Twitter #MadeWithWowchemy / #MadeWithAcademic
Markdown Slides now get a menu, support for Mermaid diagrams, and customization via the full range of RevealJS options
- Reveal.js upgraded from v3.8.0 to v4.1.0 (#2018)
Improved Book navigation for courses/docs/notebooks - see below
The Portfolio widget can now be filtered on the backend by a set of tags (e.g. active/inactive projects or courses)
- See an example
Option to un-publish author pages (see below)

Other notable changes include:

Show button links in listings irrespective of their page type
- For example, if a blog post has an attachment, it will now be linked in the listing as well as in its page header.
Add option to show social links in the site header (#2010) - see below
Add support for all event types beyond just talks
Add Cyberpunk and Earth theme packs
Show popular queries in the search dialog
- Click the search icon above for a real, live example
The Spoiler and Table of Contents shortcodes now use the newly standardised collapsable HTML toggle component - functions similarly to GitHub toggle lists
Significant refactoring and optimization of the code base
Enable homepage section backgrounds to be set to gradient colors in color theme packs
Fix avatar image when sharing author profiles due to breaking change in Hugo (#1987)
Fix code highlight theme not applying in dark mode
Migrate Google Maps integration to be compatible with the latest API
Translation updates to English, Hebrew, EU, ES
More comprehensive continuous integration pipeline to mitigate risk of bugs from contributions and increase code quality
Improved performance for redirects (aliases)
- A dedicated Netlify redirects file can now be generated from front matter aliases by editing config.toml to add disableAliases = true near the top and then "redirects" to the outputs > home option

Edit publications in the integrated Wowchemy CMS

Edit common options of homepage widgets in the CMS, such as their positions and backgrounds.

A BIG shout out to all the contributors. Geo leads development with a significant amount of contributions, but also a big shoutout to Mohammad AlMarzouq for upgrading the Markdown Slides feature, Julen Etxaniz for proactively proposing the amazing security enhancements, Christian Olsen for adding social links to the header, and paazca for contributing fixes and translations.

Don’t want to publish author pages?

Given your feedback on having the option to provide author data, such as author names and avatars, but not to publish dedicated author pages for personal sites, Hugo team have responded by adding such capability to Hugo. Therefore, we have migrated away from the temporary link_authors workaround to support Hugo’s new capability.

To un-publish author pages from your site, create a content/authors/_index.md file with the following:

---
_build:
  render: never
cascade:
  _build:
    render: never
    list: always
---

Curious to learn how these new options work? Check out Hugo’s docs.

To use, add label and display options to the superuser’s (e.g. content/authors/admin/_index.md) social links:

social:
- icon: twitter
  icon_pack: fab
  link: https://twitter.com/<USERNAME>
  label: Follow me on Twitter
  display:
    header: true

Easier book navigation for users on both desktop and mobile:

Breadcrumbs can be shown at the top of pages on large screens

Add the following to the bottom of params.toml to use breadcrumb navigation on Book pages on large screens:
```
[breadcrumb]
  page_types = {book = true}
```

In the case of multiple courses/docs/notebooks (aka book of books), a link back to the list of courses/docs/notebooks is added to the book menu

Example: courses/learn-python/ will have a new item added to the book menu to link back to courses/ whereas a site with just a first-level book e.g. docs/ won’t see any change to the menu.

The book menu now shows the chapter in the book’s mobile menu
Dynamically show in-page table of contents when the right sidebar becomes hidden on smaller screens

Add {{< toc hide_on="xl" >}} where you would like the in-page ToC to appear

Hide archive pages in the CMS

Did you know that archive pages can’t yet be edited in the Wowchemy CMS? You can hide archive pages (e.g. post/_index.md) from the CMS by adding cms_exclude to their front matter and editing them separately in the GitHub Editor if needed. Homepage editing in the CMS is also currently constrained to the options which all widgets have in common, such as title, position, and background. A future release may add more specific options.

Update to this version

❤️ If you upgrade, please support the significant effort which goes into this open source movement by kindly giving back and sponsoring on GitHub

Update with:

hugo mod clean
hugo mod get github.com/wowchemy/wowchemy-hugo-themes/[email protected]
hugo mod get github.com/wowchemy/wowchemy-hugo-themes/[email protected]
hugo mod tidy

See any errors such as “failed to resolve output format” when upgrading? Check out the Troubleshooting guide.

Apply Breaking Changes

Optional Changes

To increase performance of redirects (aliases)
- A dedicated Netlify redirects file can now be generated from front matter aliases by editing config.toml to add disableAliases = true near the top and then "redirects" to the outputs > home option
To increase site security and privacy (for Netlify hosted sites):
- To enable, open config.toml and add "headers" to the outputs > home option
- Optionally, refer to the new Security guide to set your Content Security Policy (CSP)
If using events/talks:
- Rename content/talk folder to content/event (if applicable)
- Remove type: talk or layout: talk from the front matter of any event/talk page (if applicable)
- In any homepage (widget page) section which filters on events/talks (e.g. the default content/home/talks.md), find the page_type option in the front matter and change its value from talk to event
- To keep any existing /talk/ URLs, set the following in config.toml:
```
[permalinks]
  event = "/talk/:slug/"
```

Known limitations

If using syntax highlighting, enable the site-wide highlight option in params.toml until Hugo v0.81 is released, due to a Hugo limitation with the per-page setting