Since I started running my blog on Hugo, I feel that it has become easier to expand it myself. My two last articles were kinda connected. Some times I would like to create a link to a post that isn’t complete yet. But how irritating would it not be, if somebody followed the link and I wasn’t done. So.. Lets create a link for the future.

There are are a few ways to do links within Hugo. The basic one is:

[link](url "title")

That will look like this, nice but that gives us links pages that doesn’t exist. If we look at the documentation, they sugggest using ref.

[About]({{< ref "/page/about" >}} "About Me")

That makes it easier to to handle. But what happens with pages that dont exist or nor yet published? We get an REF_NOT_FOUND: Ref error. So then I can’t use that for the future either. So I decided to write my own.

So I started by creating my own shortcode, by creating a file called blogpoint.html in layouts/shortcodes. This is the shortcode blogpoint. I filled the file with:

{{$page := .Site.GetPage (.Get "page") }}
{{$text := .Get "text"}}
{{ if (and ($page) (not ($page.Draft)) (lt $page.PublishDate now)) }}
<a href="{{$page.Permalink}}" title="{{$page.Title}}">{{$text}}</a>
{{ else }}
{{ $text }}
{{ end }}

You call it using two paramaters. This is the sample I used in my last blog post.

{{<blogpoint text="a migrated domain controller" page="/sids-and-rids-in-the-domain">}}

• It uses two paramaters, text and page.
• It fetches the page using .Site.GetPage
• Verifies that the page exists, isn’t a draft and the publish date has passed.
• If that is true it will create a link with a title.
• Otherwise it will just print the text without any extra.

So now I can link to the future and the links shows up when the time has come.

I took some coding ideas from