About Popular
The story, the name, the license, and who keeps the lights on.
Popular wasn’t designed in the abstract: it was built by a real-life serial conference organizer, distilled from years of running meetups, workshops and conferences. The ops handbook, the runbooks with checkboxes, the “venue wanted” badge: every feature comes from something a real community needed. It works for communities of any kind: tech meetups, supper clubs, aquarium keepers, fan clubs.
Who’s behind it
Popular is created and maintained by a multi-award-winning open source contributor and serial conference organizer. Open source isn’t a distribution channel here, it’s the root system: the theme is developed in the open, MIT licensed, and shaped by the same open source culture its creator has spent years building in.
The name
It’s named after the Darren Hayes song Pop!ular. A theme whose whole job is helping small communities put on a good show deserved a name with some sparkle. The palette follows suit: marquee gold, sunglass black, and the periwinkle of a certain music-video blazer.
Two frameworks, one theme
Hugo or Astro? Why not both? Popular ships for Hugo and Astro as parallel implementations of the same design: identical CSS and behaviour JS, the same content model, the same four demos. A written contract (PARITY.md) plus CI keep them from drifting. Use whichever stack your community prefers, switching later means moving Markdown files, not rewriting a site.
Maintainer
Multi-award-winning open source contributor and serial conference organizer. Started Popular after one too many community sites rebuilt from scratch: it's everything she's learned about what a community needs from its website, in one theme.
Support Popular
Popular is free and MIT licensed, and the best support is seeing it used. If the theme made your community site easier, here’s how to give back:
- Star the repo: stars are how other organizers discover the theme
- Tell others about it: recommend it to another meetup, club or community, or use it yourself for your next community site
- Sponsor on GitHub: fund ongoing maintenance of both implementations, and join these wonderful people
Credits & license
- Typography: Inter & Quantico (Google Fonts) · Icons: Font Awesome 6
- All demo content is fictional; demo imagery is generated placeholder art
- MIT licensed: fork it, re-brand it, and share your community’s version