Bilberry Hugo Theme: Summing Up the Year 2023

2024-01-01 Bilberry Jamstack Write-Up Igor Baiborodine

How quickly time flies. It seems that we recently summed up the results of 2022 for the Bilberry Hugo theme, but 2024 has already arrived, and again, it is time to take stock of what has been achieved over the past year.

Back then, I concluded the summary for 2022 with the following:

“I hope the New Year 2023 will be as fruitful as the past 2022, and the Bilberry Hugo theme will continue developing and delighting its users.”

My hopes were justified; 2023 turned out to be a very productive year for the Bilberry Hugo theme, which, during this period, continued its development with new 17 releases. One of the main achievements of 2023 was the release of a new major version, namely v4, which contained several breaking changes and other significant improvements.

Here is what the v4 version contained:

Migrate from npm to Hugo pipes for SCSS and JavaScript processing
Migrate to the Hugo way of adding menu items in the top navigation bar
Migrate from highlight.js to Hugo’s built-in syntax highlighting
Upgrade Font Awesome icons from v5 to v6
Migrate from the Magnific Popup plugin to DimBox for image modal zoom
Add scroll back to the top button

Please read this article to get more insights on the v4 development.

Another highlight of 2023 is the addition of support for day/night or light/dark theme mode. This feature request was dated back to 2019, and finally, in 2023, it was implemented. Special thanks go to our contributor, Atsuya Watanabe, who diligently worked on this feature. The Bilberry Sandbox is deployed with this new feature enabled, and you can try it out for yourself.

Here is a recap of other things that have been added, improved, and fixed in 2023, thanks to the collaborative effort of numerous volunteers.

New Features

Hyperlink image shortcode
“prefix” for OGP in the head tag
Generic hook system for further customizations and integration with third-party services

Improvements

Only listen to ESC or S keys when required
Adjusted behavior of language selector in site’s header and footer
Display copyright years as a range

Bug Fixes

Broken RSS link in HTML
Continue Reading link not displayed after summary split
Broken categories’ links in the footer when deployed on GitHub pages
Archive page displayed in latest post section in the footer

The Bilberry Hugo theme has now:

339+ stars
151+ forks
49+ contributors
21+ translations

I look forward to 2024, continuing to put forth my best efforts and work hard to develop the theme and support its users.