You’re probably familiar with the fact that Hugo has a wonderfully intricate and seemingly endless set of lookup order rules for figuring how to construct your website. This applies to layout files, themes, and all sorts of things in Hugo. Each type of resource has its own lookup order, and you could probably spend several years reading about it all if you wanted to.
However, it is fairly simple to understand some basic intended practices with regards to themes and theme modification in Hugo. The basic rule is, let the theme do its job unobstructed unless something actually needs to be overridden to be modified. Or, put another way, don’t just install a theme, copy the layout and style file folders into your Hugo files directory, and start chopping them up. This basically negates the entire purpose of having changeable themes in the themes directory. …