description: Hugo can render alternative views of your content, which is especially useful in list and summary views.
date: 2017-02-01
publishdate: 2017-02-01
lastmod: 2017-02-01
categories: [templates]
keywords: [views]
menu:
docs:
parent: "templates"
weight: 70
weight: 70
sections_weight: 70
draft: false
aliases: []
toc: true
---
These alternative **content views** are especially useful in [list templates][lists].
The following are common use cases for content views:
* You want content of every type to be shown on the homepage but only with limited [summary views][summaries].
* You only want a bulleted list of your content on a [taxonomy list page][taxonomylists]. Views make this very straightforward by delegating the rendering of each different type of content to the content itself.
## Create a Content View
To create a new view, create a template in each of your different content type directories with the view name. The following example contains an "li" view and a "summary" view for the `posts` and `project` content types. As you can see, these sit next to the [single content view][single] template, `single.html`. You can even provide a specific view for a given type and continue to use the `_default/single.html` for the primary view.
Hugo also has support for a default content template to be used in the event that a specific content view template has not been provided for that type. Content views can also be defined in the `_default` directory and will work the same as list and single templates who eventually trickle down to the `_default` directory as a matter of the lookup order.
In this example, `.Render` is passed into the template to call the [render function][render]. `.Render` is a special function that instructs content to render itself with the view template provided as the first argument. In this case, the template is going to render the `summary.html` view that follows:
<divclass="post-meta">{{ .Date.Format "Mon, Jan 2, 2006" }} - {{ .FuzzyWordCount }} Words </div>
</header>
{{ .Summary }}
<footer>
<ahref='{{ .Permalink }}'><nobr>Read more →</nobr></a>
</footer>
</article>
{{</code>}}
### `li.html`
Continuing on the previous example, we can change our render function to use a smaller `li.html` view by changing the argument in the call to the `.Render` function (i.e., `{{ .Render "li" }}`).
