Blowfish Theme and Hugo Future Publishing

Does Blowfish Support Future Publishing?

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Yes, the Blowfish theme supports future publishing, but this is actually a core Hugo feature rather than a theme-specific capability. As a Hugo theme, Blowfish inherits Hugo’s built-in content scheduling functionality.

Gotcha

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Where Blowfish encounters a little issue is that the date field in the front matter takes precendence over the publishDate when displaying the article date in the output.

In my opinion, this is a bit confusing. You may want to track the original date of when the article was created, but the publishDate should take precedence when displaying it to readers.

It is easy to overcome by simply commenting out the date field.

How Future Publishing Works in Hugo

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Hugo has built-in support for scheduling content publication through date settings in your post’s front matter. There are two primary ways to schedule a post for the future:

1. Using the standard date parameter
2. Using the more specific publishDate parameter

Example Front Matter

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---
title: "My Future Post"
date: 2025-12-31T12:00:00-05:00      # Post will not appear until this date
publishDate: 2025-12-31T12:00:00-05:00  # Alternative approach
draft: false
---

How Hugo Handles Future Content

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By default, Hugo will not build or publish content with dates set in the future. This means:

1. When you run hugo to build your site, future posts won’t be included in the output
2. When you run hugo server for local development, future posts won’t be visible

Testing Future Posts Locally

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If you want to preview how your future posts will look, you can use the --buildFuture flag:

hugo server --buildFuture

This will include future-dated content in your local preview server, allowing you to see how the post will appear when published.

Deployment Considerations

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When deploying your site:

1. Standard builds (hugo) will exclude future content
2. To force inclusion of future content (not typically recommended for production), you would use hugo --buildFuture
3. For most deployment scenarios, you’ll want future posts to appear automatically on their publication date, which requires:
   • Regular rebuilds of your site (e.g., daily via CI/CD)
   • Or a serverless function that triggers a rebuild at specified times

Setting Up Automatic Publishing

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For true scheduled publishing, you’ll need your hosting platform to rebuild your site regularly:

1. GitHub Actions/GitLab CI: Configure workflows to rebuild daily
2. Netlify/Vercel: Set up build hooks with scheduled triggers
3. Cloudflare Pages: Use Cron triggers to rebuild automatically

Conclusion

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The Blowfish theme fully supports Hugo’s native future publishing capabilities. Simply set your post’s date to a future value, and it will automatically appear on your site once that date arrives (and your site rebuilds).

If you’re planning to use this feature extensively, make sure your hosting platform is configured to rebuild your site at least once daily so that scheduled content appears in a timely manner.