hugoDocs/content/content-management/summaries.md

title	linktitle	description	date	publishdate	lastmod	categories	tags	menu	weight	draft	aliases	toc
Content Summaries	Summaries	Hugo can generate summaries of your content to show snippets in summary views. You have the option to split these summaries yourself or let Hugo automatically generate them for you.	2017-01-10	2017-01-10	2017-01-10	content management	summaries abstracts read more	main parent weight Content Management 90	90	false	/content/summaries/ /content-management/content-summaries/	true

With the use of the .Summary page variable, Hugo can generate summaries of content to show snippets in summary views. The summary view snippets are automatically generated by Hugo and offer two splitting options.

Summary Splitting Options

You have two options for where the content is split:

• Hugo-defined Summary Split
• User-defined Summary Split

Content summaries may also provide links to the original content. A common design pattern is to see this link in the form of a "Read More..." button. To make this easier, you can leverage the .RelPermalink, .Permalink, and .Truncated page variables.

Hugo-defined: Automatic Summary Splitting

By default, Hugo automatically takes the first 70 words of your content as its summary and stores it into the .Summary page variable for use in your templates. Taking the Hugo-defined approach to summaries may save time, but it has pros and cons:

• Pros: Automatic, no additional work on your part.
• Cons: All HTML tags are stripped from the summary, and the first 70 words, whether they belong to a heading or to different paragraphs, are all lumped into one paragraph.

{{% note %}} The Hugo-defined summaries are set to use word count by default. However, "word count" is relatively defined. If you are creating content in a CJK language and want to use Hugo's automatic summary splitting, set hasCJKLanguage to true in you site configuration. {{% /note %}}

User-defined: Manual Summary Splitting

Alternatively, you may add the <!--more--> summary divider where you want to split the article. For org content, use # more where you want to split the article. Content that comes before the summary divider will be used as that content's summary and stored in the .Summary page variable with all HTML formatting intact.

{{% note "Summary Divider"%}} The concept of a summary divider is not unique to Hugo. It is also called the "more tag" or "excerpt separator" in other literature. {{% /note %}}

• Pros: Freedom, precision, and improved rendering. All HTML tags and formatting are preserved.
• Cons: Extra work for content authors, since they need to remember to type <!--more--> (or # more for org content) in each content file. This can be automated by adding the summary divider below the front matter of an archetype.

{{% warning "Be Precise with the Summary Divider" %}} Be careful to enter <!--more--> exactly; i.e., all lowercase and with no whitespace. Any mistakes in the divider will tell Hugo to treat the divider as a regular comment and will fail to store your desired content in the .Summary variable. {{% /warning %}}

Example: First 10 Articles with Summaries

You can show content summaries with the following code. You could use the following snippet, for example, in a section template.

{{% code file="page-list-with-summaries.html" %}}

{{ range first 10 .Data.Pages }}
    <article>
      <div class="summary">
        <h2><a href="{{ .RelPermalink }}">{{ .Title }}</a></h2>
        {{ .Summary }}
      </div>
      {{ if .Truncated }}
      <div class="read-more-link">
        <a href="{{ .RelPermalink }}">Read More…</a>
      </div>
      {{ end }}
    </article>
{{ end }}

{{% /code %}}

Note how the .Truncated boolean valuable may be used to hide the "Read More..." link when the content is not truncated; i.e., when the summary contains the entire article.