thor/site/content/docs.md

{ "title": "Docs", "date": "2026-07-22T08:54:00-04:00" }

[TOC]

Introduction

This guide assumes you have either read The Guide, or have built a Hugo site before. It also assumes you have a basic knowledge of HTML and CSS.

Features

Thor has many features and content processors available. In an effort to provide the best out of the box experience, most of them are enabled by default.

Opt-In Features

TODO: #### deflist syntax

TODO: #### footnotes

Minify

If enabled, minify will perform simple whitespace removal on all your output .html files, and any .css files in your assets directories. Minifying JavaScript is not supported at this time.

Opt-Out Features

• emoji
• sidenotes/marginnotes
• syntax highlighting
• heading ids

Directories

Like Hugo, a Thor project is a collection of specially named directories, plus a config file.

content

content holds your pages and page bundles.

layouts

layouts holds your templates and partials.

assets : assets contains any static files for your site (favicon.ico, etc.), as well as files you want to send through the asset pipeline (CSS or JS files).

public : public will contain your completed site.

All of these names can be remapped in thor.json.

[!NOTE] While directories can be remapped at the site level, modules must (currently) adhere to the defaults.

Asset pipeline

Currently, there is only one asset processor, and that is the minifier.

Pages & Page Bundles

Page content can either be defined in a single file (contact.md), or in a directory (contact/index.md, contact/our-team.jpg). Single file pages are preferred to page bundles.¹

Thor currently supports 2 formats for page files: MarkDown (.md), and HTML (.html).

Templates

Slots

[!NOTE] (to self) Template modification is an "advanced" feature, and shoud probably be discussed later in the page. (or possibly in the guide.)

When building your own templates, you are of course free to pick whatever names you choose for your partials and content slots. However, sticking to conventions helps create consistency in the ecosystem, and prevents friction when relying on a built-in template.

{{$main}}...{{/main}}

the main section should be used in templates to denote the part of the page that is unique to that page. For the most part, your templates should look like this

{{<base}}
{{$main}}
<main>
  <h1>Actual page content goes here</h1>
  {{&page.content}}
</main>
{{/main}}
{{/base}}

Context

TODO: Context can be a confusing name in Odin.

now

The Current DateTime. see DateTime

title

The title of the current page. Unless overridden, it will be expand to {{ page.title }} | {{ site.title }}. ²

date_format

The default format to use for dates. Configured in thor.json:date.format.

timezone

The timezone to convert all | formatted dates to. Configured in thor.json:date.timezone.

site

The site parameters that are usable in templates, see site

pages

Returns all regular pages, sorted by ?. Regular pages exclude index pages like home and section roots::

og

Contains the Open Graph metadata for the current page.

Page

page.content

The HTML rendered page content

TODO: write

Site

TODO: Write

Params

site.params and page.params are an escape hatch to let users inject arbetrary data into their website. The following are some conventional examples theme developers may want to use to ensure a consistent experience across themes.

author

The author of the current page or site. See schema.org for the recommended format.

Filters

group_by <field>

Allows you to group pages by the given field.

sort_by <field> <asc|desc>

Allows you to sort pages by the given field.

first <n>

Given a list, returns only the first n items. n defaults to 1. Given a string, returns the first n runes of the string. To help catch mistakes, n is required for strings.

last <n>

Given a list, returns only the last n items. n defaults to 1. Given a string, returns the first n runes of the string. To help catch mistakes, n is required for strings.

format "<format string>"

Used to display a date in a particular format. See DateTimes. If no format is given, the default will be used.

Partials

Partials are templates that render a portion of a page. To include a partial, the standard mustache syntax is used. All partials are resolved relative to the root partials directory, so to include a partial at layouts/partials/my_partial.html, you would use {{> my_partial}}.

Users can create as many partials as they want, and several are included for convienience:

{{> opengraph}}

This partial willl render the Open Graph meta tags for your page. It should be placed inside the <head> tag. It See the Open Graph section for more details.

DateTimes

Dates are strings in one of the following formats:

Format	Time zone
2023-10-15T13:18:50-07:00	America/Los_Angeles
2023-10-15T13:18:50-0700	America/Los_Angeles
2023-10-15T13:18:50Z	Etc/UTC
2023-10-15T13:18:50	Default is local system time
2023-10-15	Default is local system time
15 Oct 2023	Default is local system time

If you want to display a date in a different format, you can use the | format Filter. With no argument, it will default to formatting the date with site.date_format.

Menus

TODO: Describe

Open Graph

TODO: default Template support TODO: Template override support TODO: how to overwrite defaults (in page frontmatter / thor.json)

Zen

The guding principals behind Thor.

Simpler is Better

We are Grug developers. We do everything the "dumb" way first, then optimize the measured bottlenecks.

Zero is Beautiful

The less configuration needed, the better. A site can be built from multiple modules or a single index.md.

On By Default

Users shouldn't have to enable features, unless those features significantly impact performance or mangle regular content.

Fault Tolerant

When possible, mistakes should be recovered with warnings. When fatal errors occur, the user should have all the information they need to fix it quickly.

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1. That's not you say you shouldn't use bundles, but if you have no additional resources on your page, there's no benefit to using a bundle. ↩︎

2. Is there actually a way to overwrite this? ↩︎