Academic Builder

An academic website template with easy setup and advanced navigation tools.

View Live Demo →

Quick start

1. Click Use this template → Create a new repository.
2. In Settings → Pages, set Source to GitHub Actions.
3. Edit data/profile.toml with your information.
4. Replace static/images/avatar.svg and static/files/cv.pdf.
5. Push to main.

One-file site customization

Edit only:

data/profile.toml

It controls your name, title, institution, department, email, location, profile image, bio, education, research interests, CV, social links, theme behavior, search, selected publications, sidebar width, content width, and accent colors.

Add a page/tab

Create any top-level Markdown file in content/:

---
title: "Projects"
weight: 25
---

Your content here.

It automatically becomes a desktop and mobile navigation tab. Lower weight values appear first.

Useful optional front matter:

menu: false        # keep the page but hide its navigation tab
toc: true          # show an on-page table of contents
math: true         # load MathJax for LaTeX
search: false      # omit the page from site search
external_url: "https://example.com"  # make the tab open an external page

Publications

Edit:

data/publications.toml

The Publications page and homepage Selected Publications section update automatically. Entries can include DOI, PDF, code, abstract, BibTeX, and a selected = true flag.

CV

Replace:

static/files/cv.pdf

The CV tab opens the PDF directly. Change its path or label in data/profile.toml if needed.

Run locally (optional)

Install Hugo Extended, then run:

hugo server

Main structure

content/                  # Independent Markdown pages / navigation tabs
data/profile.toml         # Site-wide identity, links, design, and features
data/publications.toml    # Publication records
layouts/                  # Hugo templates and publication renderer
static/css/site.css       # Visual system
static/js/site.js         # Theme, mobile menu, search, back-to-top
static/images/            # Profile image and site images
static/files/cv.pdf       # CV
.github/workflows/        # GitHub Pages deployment

Acknowledgements

This website template is an independent Hugo implementation inspired in part by al-folio, an open-source academic website project by Maruan Al-Shedivat and contributors, distributed under the MIT License.

The template is built with Hugo and optionally uses MathJax for mathematical typesetting.

Design and Hugo implementation: Harshit Bhatt.