Structure hugo blog posts with hextra theme

10 March 2025

By default hextra will create one big list of blog posts. You can structure you posts in subfolders and add _index.md files to control this behaviour.

Example configuration

Blog post folder

content/posts/_index.md

---
title: Blog
weight: 1
draft: false
sidebar:
  open: false
cascade:
  type: blog
---

Subfolders in posts

I structure posts with subfolders for year and month:

- _index.md
- - - _index.md
- - _index.md
  - - _index.md
  - - _index.md

hugo.yaml

Group via _index.md file

Then I create an _index.md file in every subfolder that I want to group. At the moment I only create this file for previous months and years so the most recent month/year will appear directly.

Previous months

content/posts/2025/02/_index.md

---
title: February 2025
draft: false
sidebar:
	open: false
# type: blog
description: All posts in February 2025
---

Previous years

content/posts/2024/_index.md

---
title: 2024
draft: false
sidebar:
	open: false
# type: blog
description: All posts in 2024
---

Create post urls without year/month

Use post slugs and adjust permalinks configuration to get post urls without year and month(link to blog post)

I use slugs only permalinks to avoid having year and month in a post page url.

Configure previous and next post links

by default hugo hextra will not show links to the next post at the bottom of the page when its the last/first post of a subfolder
but you can set the links manually in the frontmatter of a post
```
---
prev: '<next-newer-post-slug>'
next: '<previous-older-post-slug'
---
```
- for some reason these fields are reversed (prev link must be next post and vice versa)
  - there seems to be some discussion about this

Additional resources

hugo hextra documentation: Organize Files

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