Switching from PaperMod to al-folio

Introduction

This post isn’t very different from Jesse Wei’s post, which was also inspired by another. Inspira-ception, it seems.

Like him, I found quite a few issues with PaperMod. This post is mostly me trying to get the hang of the Markdown styling as well as blog posting in general (lol).

I’d also like to preface this by giving my utmost respect to all who contribute to these themes. They’re all really great themes, and I’m thankful there are people who are willing to put their time and effort into these and/or FOSS in general.

With that said: What were my issues?

No dropdown menu on mobile

PaperMod seems to strive for minimalism, to the point of discarding what I consider to be basic functionality. Take the navbar as an example:

Why does it look like that? Is there no dropdown menu available for the navbar on mobile?

To me, it didn’t feel right. The buttons felt hard to click and out of place.

Minimalism(?)

From PaperMod’s README:

“The goal of this project is to add more features and customization to the og theme.”

I did a double take from that to issue #62, which involves the same issue I was having prior.

Wouldn’t that be a nice thing to have? It’s possible: the theme PaperMod is based on does!

I was confused on the general goals of PaperMod. The maintainer would reject pull requests that I believe would have given the theme more functionality.

Why not PaperModX?

PaperModX was created to improve the codebase of and add more functionality to PaperMod.

A fork of a fork of a fork was something I didn’t feel like dealing with much, especially when all of the projects and maintainers were active.

In the end I didn’t feel too bad (it has a cool profile mode!) but I felt like I could’ve done better.

Use all the themes!

It was when I was too confused with PaperMod that I decided to give hugo-coder a try. I liked the profile page style for both themes, and Coder “fixed” the mobile navbar.

I would have stopped here, but while searching for more alternatives (just to see what was available), I found Jesse’s post.

Jesse changed his blog theme from PaperMod to al-folio. His reasoning was incredibly solid, but I still was on the fence if it was right for me.

What attracted me to al-folio?

The functionality.

al-folio has everything I could have hoped for in a static site. It’s mainly used by academic researchers and conferences, but I had little to no issues making it my own.

Posts can contain a lot of media, incuding graphs, code diffs, charts, maps, comments, etc. without any additional configuration.

It’s also relatively well documented. I found the documentation for PaperMod to be lacking, so I had to do a lot of digging to see what was possible.

Note

One thing in al-folio I haven’t tried yet is whether the _posts/ directory can contain folders with a post and sources used (like images).

I’ll update this if it works!

Conclusion

Well, this was a lot of nothing.

I again thank Jesse for his post.

Of course, I hope I can eventually provide legitimate posts people would enjoy. As of right now, that’s all I’ve got.

If you got this far, I hope you’re having a good day. Stay safe out there.