GSoC 2026 Interest: Website Modernization — Hugo Prototype + Questions

Jobs & theses market GSoC
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Hi Frederic, Gerasimos, and team,

I’m Akhilesh, a Computer Science student with hands-on Hugo experience from contributing to the Meshery project. When I saw the website modernization project, I felt right at home
I’ve worked through exactly this kind of Jekyll → Hugo migration before.

Before writing a full proposal, I built a working prototype to understand the migration scope:

:link: https://precice.netlify.app/

What I implemented:

  • Hugo + Docsy theme with real precice content ported
  • Dark / Light / Auto mode toggle (system-preference aware)
  • Client-side search via Pagefind (fully static, no backend)
  • Hugo modules setup to replace the submodule approach
  • Build time: ~2s first build, <1s incremental

While exploring the codebase I also opened PR #725 fixing Open Graph meta tags and adding Twitter Card support to contribute something useful and understand the repo structure before proposing larger changes.

A few questions before I finalize my proposal:

  1. KaTeX is already in head.html — should I preserve it as-is in the Hugo migration or is upgrading to latest worth the effort?

  2. For multi-repo content — is read-only pulling from tutorials/adapters sufficient, or is there a
    bidirectional workflow needed?

  3. Bootstrap 5 is listed as Phase 1 target — is there openness to Tailwind CSS? It makes dark mode cleaner natively. Completely happy with Bootstrap 5 if
    that’s preferred.

  4. For search: I used Pagefind (zero dependency). Would you consider Algolia DocSearch (free for OSS)?

Looking forward to your thoughts.

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Welcome @Yakhilesh,

thanks for the PR improving the social media previews!

https://github.com/precice/precice.github.io/pulls?q=is%3Apr+author%3AYadavAkhileshh

To your questions:

This is a detail. In the GSoC project, we would of course update everything to the latest versions.

Only pulling is enough, there is no scenario under which the tutorials would pull from the website.

We would like to stay with Bootstrap, unless there are very good reasons not to.

We will stay with Algolia, unless there are reasons not to.

Nice to see a prototype! It differs a lot from the current style, without much motivation. But good to see the creativity.

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Thanks for the detailed answers @Makis totally clear on bootstrap, algolia, and the multi-repo setup.

And fair point on the prototype, I got a bit carried away with the styling. I will bring it much closer to the current preCICE look using bootstrap 5 so it actually feels like a migration rather than a redesign. Working on the updated version and the full proposal now

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Hi @Makis, just submitted my draft proposal on the GSoC portal. Would love to hear your thoughts before the final deadline!

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