An Introduction to Slumdown

A Hugo theme and R package by Danielle Navarro


The idea behind slumdown is to provide an R package and Hugo theme designed to work together when writing a blogdown site (see the about page for more detail). The posts listed below area work in progress, but are intended to serve as a succinct introduction and how-to guide.



  • Tutorial part 1: Getting started   21 Apr 2019
    A sort summary of how to get started using the slumdown package. It discusses how to install the package, set up a new site, and where to look for initial configuration.

  • Tutorial part 2: Writing a post   20 Apr 2019
    Like any blogdown post, a slumdown post is written in R Markdown, and uses a few custom fields in the YAML field. This tutorial provides an illustration of how different kinds of content are displayed.

  • Tutorial part 3: Colour palettes in slumdown   19 Apr 2019
    The main reason I wrote slumdown (besides boredom) was to make it easy to include user-defined colours palettes in blogdown, and expose those palettes to R so that (for instance) plots can be drawn in a style that matches the blog style. This tutorial introduces this palette system.

  • Tutorial part 4: Customising the header   18 Apr 2019
    Slumdown allows the user to control the background image at the top of each post, the profile image overlaid in the middle of that image, and the caption attached to the header image. This post describes how this is done.

  • Tutorial part 5: Deploying to GitHub   17 Apr 2019
    This tutorial describes how to deploy a site. Blogdown sites are very often deployed to Netlify, but I have a personal bias to use GitHub Pages, so slumdown is configured by default to use GitHub.

  • Tutorial part 6: Some notes on Hugo   16 Apr 2019
    Eventually, this will be an explanation of how the Hugo slum theme is designed, possibly accompanied by a brief tutorial on Hugo.

  • A kunoichi page   15 Apr 2019
    A simple project page illustrating how user-defined themes in slumdown can be used as the basis of individual pages and ggplot2 figures. It doesn’t do very much.