🧭 What’s the Plan?

This week, the mission is to cleanly separate the theme (design) from the site content, and bring both under proper version control so the site is maintainable, scalable, and dev-friendly moving forward.

✅ Current Setup Recap

  • I’ve forked the PaperMod theme and started working on my own version: hugo-papermodest

  • I created a demo/testing site using: hugo new site hugo-papermodest-demo --format yaml

  • The forked theme is added as a git submodule to the demo using:

    git submodule add ../hugo-papermodest themes/hugo-papermodest

  • The theme loads and works locally on localhost via hugo server.

🎯 Goal for This Week

Get my live site (faisaldarbar.com) running cleanly on my forked theme (hugo-papermodest), using the new demo structure.

✍️ Tasks Breakdown

🔁 1. Copy Over Content from Old Repo

Copy only the content files (like content/, config/, static/, assets/, etc.) from faisaldarbar.github.io into hugo-papermodest-demo.

❗️Do NOT copy any theme/layout files — this is the job of the submodule now.

🎨 2. Migrate Theme Customizations to hugo-papermodest

All design/layout changes I’ve made until now (which were previously done inside the site repo) must now go inside the theme submodule repo (hugo-papermodest).

✅ Example:

Previously changed inside the site’s layouts/_default/baseof.html:

<head>
  {{- partial "head.html" . }}
</head>

➡️ Now changed to:

<head>
  {{- partial "head.html" . }}
  {{- partial "head-extra.html" . }}
</head>

✅ This change should now live in:
hugo-papermodest/layouts/_default/baseof.html
and be committed to the theme repo only.

🚀 3. Prepare for Live Launch

Once both content and theme changes are done and working locally:

  • Rename hugo-papermodest-demo ➝ faisaldarbar.github.io
  • Remove the current faisaldarbar.github.io (after backup)
  • Push my custom theme to my Hugo PaperMod theme forked repository, and my updated site with the latest content and design to: https://faisaldarbar.com.

💡 Why This Matters

Normally, when we use a theme as a submodule, we copy over theme files into the project and make changes there.

But in this case, I’m building a theme for myself, for the first time ever — so I’m officially a dev now 😎

I plan to share the theme on GitHub for others to use. That’s why I’m keeping the theme and the content separate, using the submodule approach….

🛠️ Bonus Tips

Make sure to:

git add .
git commit -m "Theme + content separation complete"
git push

in both repos when you’re done.

Let’s ship it! 🚀