---
title: "Front Matter"
Pubdate: "2013-07-01"
---

The front matter is one of the features that gives Hugo it's strength. It enables
you to include the meta data of the content right with it. Hugo supports a few 
different formats. The main format supported is YAML. Here is an example:

    ---
    Title: "spf13-vim 3.0 release and new website"
    Description: "spf13-vim is a cross platform distribution of vim plugins and resources for Vim."
    Tags: [ ".vimrc", "plugins", "spf13-vim", "vim" ]
    Pubdate: "2012-04-06"
    Categories:
      - "Development"
      - "VIM"
    Slug: "spf13-vim-3-0-release-and-new-website"
    ---

### Variables

There are a few predefined variables that Hugo is aware of and utilizes. The user can also create
any variable they want to. These will be placed into the `.Params` variable available to the templates.

#### Required

**Title**  The title for the content. <br>
**Description** The description for the content.<br>
**Pubdate** The date the content will be sorted by.<br>
**Indexes** These will use the field name of the plural form of the index (see tags and categories above)

#### Optional

**Draft** If true the content will not be rendered unless `hugo` is called with -d<br>
**Type** The type of the content (will be derived from the directory automatically if unset).<br>
**Markup** (Experimental) Specify "rst" for reStructuredText (requires
           `rst2html`,) or "md" (default) for the Markdown.<br>
**Slug** The token to appear in the tail of the url.<br>
  *or*<br>
**Url** The full path to the content from the web root.<br>
*If neither is present the filename will be used.*