hugo/docs/content/templates/menu-templates.md

title	linktitle	description	date	publishdate	lastmod	categories	menu	weight	sections_weight	draft	aliases	toc
Menu Templates	Menu Templates	Menus are a powerful but simple feature for content management but can be easily manipulated in your templates to meet your design needs.	2017-02-01	2017-02-01	2017-02-01	templates	docs parent weight templates 130	130	130	false	/templates/menus/	false

Hugo makes no assumptions about how your rendered HTML will be structured. Instead, it provides all of the functions you will need to be able to build your menu however you want.

The following is an example:

{{% code file="layouts/partials/sidebar.html" download="sidebar.html" %}}

<!-- sidebar start -->
<aside>
    <div id="sidebar" class="nav-collapse">
        <!-- sidebar menu start-->
        <ul class="sidebar-menu">
          {{ $currentPage := . }}
          {{ range .Site.Menus.main }}
              {{ if .HasChildren }}

            <li class="sub-menu{{if $currentPage.HasMenuCurrent "main" . }} active{{end}}">
            <a href="javascript:;" class="">
                {{ .Pre }}
                <span>{{ .Name }}</span>
                <span class="menu-arrow arrow_carrot-right"></span>
            </a>
            <ul class="sub">
                {{ range .Children }}
                <li{{if $currentPage.IsMenuCurrent "main" . }} class="active"{{end}}><a href="{{.URL}}"> {{ .Name }} </a> </li>
                {{ end }}
            </ul>
          {{else}}
            <li>
            <a href="{{.URL}}">
                {{ .Pre }}
                <span>{{ .Name }}</span>
            </a>
          {{end}}
          </li>
          {{end}}
            <li> <a href="https://github.com/gohugoio/hugo/issues" target="blank">Questions and Issues</a> </li>
            <li> <a href="#" target="blank">Edit this Page</a> </li>
        </ul>
        <!-- sidebar menu end-->
    </div>
</aside>
<!--sidebar end-->

{{% /code %}}

{{% note "absLangURL and relLangURL" %}} Use the absLangUrl or relLangUrl functions if your theme makes use of the multilingual feature. In contrast to absURL and relURL, these two functions add the correct language prefix to the url. {{% /note %}}

Section Menu for Lazy Bloggers

To enable this menu, add the following to your site config:

SectionPagesMenu = "main"

The menu name can be anything, but take a note of what it is.

This will create a menu with all the sections as menu items and all the sections' pages as "shadow-members". The shadow implies that the pages isn't represented by a menu-item themselves, but this enables you to create a top-level menu like this:

<nav class="sidebar-nav">
    {{ $currentPage := . }}
    {{ range .Site.Menus.main }}
    <a class="sidebar-nav-item{{if or ($currentPage.IsMenuCurrent "main" .) ($currentPage.HasMenuCurrent "main" .) }} active{{end}}" href="{{.URL}}">{{ .Name }}</a>
    {{ end }}
</nav>

In the above, the menu item is marked as active if on the current section's list page or on a page in that section.

The above is all that's needed. But if you want custom menu items, e.g. changing weight or name, you can define them manually in the site config, i.e. config.toml:

[[menu.main]]
    name = "This is the blog section"
    weight = -110
    identifier = "blog"
    url = "/blog/"

{{% note %}} The identifier must match the section name. {{% /note %}}