Shipping a docs site in an afternoon

Sun, 28 Jun 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Most documentation sites die of structure, not of prose. You spend the first afternoon on the generator, the second on navigation, and by the third you have written four pages and lost interest. This walkthrough skips to the part where you are writing.

Start from the module, not from a fork

Add Liftoff as a Hugo module rather than copying it into themes/. You keep the ability to update, and your repository stays small enough to read.

Multilingual from day one

Sun, 24 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Retrofitting a second language is the kind of task that looks like an afternoon and turns into a weekend. Every content file needs a counterpart, every menu entry needs a translation, every data file needs a variant, and every hardcoded date format turns out to be English.

Configuring it up front costs almost nothing, even if you only ever ship one language.

 toml
 
 
defaultContentLanguage = "en"
defaultContentLanguageInSubdir = true

[languages]
 [languages.en]
 label = "English"
 weight = 1

Content files then carry their language in the filename: about.md and about.de.md sit side by side and Hugo pairs them automatically.

Docs on Liftoff

Shipping a docs site in an afternoon

Start from the module, not from a fork

Multilingual from day one