Install the theme
Follow the steps below to upload the theme:
- Log in to your publication admin section at
yoursite.com/ghost/
- Go to Settings > Design (
yoursite.com/ghost/#/settings/design/
) - Click Change theme (
yoursite.com/ghost/#/settings/design/change-theme
) - Click Upload theme and select the
tuuli.zip
file. - After the upload is complete, under Installed themes click Activate
Routes setup
Caution
For the theme to function properly you must upload the routes.yaml
file.
The file is located inside the tuuli.zip
Follow the steps below to upload the routes.yaml
file (this is a separate step from theme upload)
- Log in to your publication admin section at
yoursite.com/ghost/
- Go to Settings > Labs (
yoursite.com/ghost/#/settings/labs
) - Under Beta features click on Upload routes file button and select the file from the root directory of the theme.
This is a testing ground for new or experimental features. They may change, break or inexplicably disappear at any time.
more info in the docs
Custom settings
The theme comes with custom design settings, which are accessible from the Ghost Admin panel.
To view and edit these settings go to Settings > Design & Branding ( yoursite.com/ghost/#/settings/design/
)
Custom settings are defined in the package.json
file.
These settings are placed under three categories:
- Site-wide settings
- Homepage settings
- Post settings
Here's a preview of the available settings:
Homepage
The homepage layout is defined in the index.hbs
file and has the following sections (besides the header and footer):
- hero
- posts
- featured tags
- subscribe CTA
Hero
The hero section can be completely customized from the Ghost Admin, including the title, description, and style.
By default the title and description will be the {{@site.title}}
and {{@site.description}}
(from Settings > General > Title & Description), and the image will be the {{@site.cover_image}}
(from Settings > Desgin > Brand > Publication cover )
If you want a more flexible description, with links and other Ghost editor elements, you have to set the Hero source page slug in Settings > Design > Homepage. You have to add the slug of an existing page, and when you do that, the hero title will be your page title, the hero description will be your page content and the hero image will be your page feature image. (For example, in the demo, the value in settings is homepage
, which means that the title, description, and image, will be taken from the /homepage/
page).
To change the style of the hero section you have to set the Home page layout in Settings > Design > Homepage. You can choose from the following options:
- hero-as-left-sidebar - the hero section appears as a sidebar on the left side, posts appearing on the right (on desktop)
- hero-as-right-sidebar - the hero section appears as a sidebar on the right side, posts appearing on the left (on desktop)
- hero-with-image-on-left - this is a wide hero section with the image on the left
- hero-with-image-on-right - this is a wide hero section with the image on the right
- hero-with-image-below - this is a wide hero section with the image appearing below the hero content
Posts
First of all, you can enable a separate featured posts section, simply by toggling the Featured posts section in Settings > Design > Homepage.
To change the style, you have to set the Post feed layout in Settings > Design > Homepage. You can choose from the following options:
- list-with-images - post feed with post cards appearing as a list, including the feature image
- list - post feed with post cards appearing as a list, without the feature image
- grid-with-images - post feed with post cards appearing as grid items, including the feature image
- grid - post feed with post cards appearing as grid items, without the feature image
Note
The Post feed layout setting will apply to both the 'Featured posts' and 'Latest posts' as well as the 'Tag' and 'Author' templates.
The pagination is in classic style allowing you to navigate to each page separately, but you can change this style by changing the partials/pagination.hbs
template.
Featured tags
To highlight some tags of your choosing, you just have to provide the tag slugs, separated by a comma in Featured tags slugs in Settings > Design > Homepage.
You can add any number of tags, but ideally, it should be a multiple of 4
.
For example, in the demo, the value of the custom setting: growth, balance, health, focus
This means that the tags with slug 'growth', 'balance', 'health', and 'focus' will be fetched and rendered.
Subscribe CTA
The subscribe section right above the footer uses the {{@site.title}}
and {{@site.description}}
,
for the headline and the description, but you can easily change it with the CTA Headline and
CTA description in Settings > Design > Site-Wide.
Additionally, the Background accent in Settings > Design > Homepage provides different predefined background-color options for the CTA section.
Custom Pages
As explained in the routes setup, the theme comes with a couple of custom pages, which need some actions from your side to be activated.
Caution
Uploading the routes.yaml
file is a key requirement for these custom pages.
By default, that is the only requirement, but if you want even more control over
the pages then you should activate the data
property and create the page with
the correct slug.
To create a Page:
- Log in to your publication admin section at
yoursite.com/ghost/
- Go to Pages (
yoursite.com/ghost/#/pages/
) - Click New page and set the Title and Page URL
- Finally, click Publish
Archive
The archive page is implemented in the archive.hbs
template.
If you want to control the meta properties for this page, you have to activate the data
property:
/archive/:
template: archive
data: page.archive # When active data will be taken from the "/archive/" page
If you activated the data property, you also have to create the page with the archive
slug.
Signup
The signup page is implemented in the signup.hbs
template.
If you want to control the meta properties for this page, you have to activate the data
property:
/signup/:
template: signup
data: page.signup # When active data will be taken from the "/signup/" page
If you activated the data property, you also have to create the page with the signup
slug.
Additionally, the feature image of this page will appear on the side full-width.
Signin
The signin page is implemented in the signin.hbs
template.
If you want to control the meta properties for this page, you have to activate the data
property:
/signin/:
template: signin
data: page.signin # When active data will be taken from the "/signin/" page
If you activated the data property, you also have to create the page with the signin
slug.
Additionally, the feature image of this page will appear on the side full-width.
Account
The account page is implemented in the account.hbs
template.
If you want to control the meta properties for this page, you have to activate the data
property:
/account/:
template: account
data: page.account # When active data will be taken from the "/account/" page
If you activated the data property, you also have to create the page with the account
slug.
Membership
The membership page is implemented in the membership.hbs
template.
If you want to control the meta properties for this page, you have to activate the data
property:
/membership/:
template: membership
data: page.membership # When active data will be taken from the "/membership/" page
If you activated the data property, you also have to create the page with the membership
slug.
Tip
The membership tier names, prices, and benefits can all be changed in the
Admin, by going to Settings > Membership ( /ghost/#/settings/members
).
Edit existing tiers or add new ones under the Membership Tiers section.
Search
By default the native Ghost search is active, but you can change it from the custom settings: Search type in Settings > Design > Site-wide.
The options are:
- Native - the Ghost native search function will be used
- Custom - the custom search function will be used
- None - deactivate the search and the icon will not be displayed
Both the native and custom search functions, work out of the box, you don't need to configure anything (besides uploading the routes file for the custom search).
The custom search is implemented in the search.hbs
template and it's based on the fuse.js library
To customize how the custom search works, you can edit the template.
Authors
The authors page is implemented in the authors.hbs
template.
If you want to control the meta properties for this page, you have to activate the data
property:
/authors/:
template: authors
data: page.authors # When active data will be taken from the "/authors/" page
If you activated the data property, you also have to create the page with the authors
slug.
Tags
The tags page is implemented in the tags.hbs
template.
If you want to control the meta properties for this page, you have to activate the data
property:
/tags/:
template: tags
data: page.tags # When active data will be taken from the "/tags/" page
If you activated the data property, you also have to create the page with the tags
slug.
Custom templates
The default post layout is defined by the post.hbs
template and the default page
layout is defined by the page.hbs
template.
The theme comes with several custom templates, which can be selected for both posts and pages, in the Post Settings menu.
Custom templates:
custom-with-background-image.hbs
- template with feature image in the backgroundcustom-with-full-width-background-image.hbs
- template with feature image being a full-width backgroundcustom-with-image-on-side.hbs
- template with feature image being on the side (on desktop)custom-with-narrow-image.hbs
- template with a narrow image format (same width as the post content)custom-with-sidebar.hbs
- template with sidebar beside the post content (on desktop), sidebar template ispartials/sidebar.hbs
custom-with-table-of-contents-and-sidebar.hbs
- template with table of contents on the left and sidebar on the right side of the post content
Tip
If you want to edit the templates these are in the root directory of the theme.
Color customization
The most important CSS configurations of the theme are defined as custom CSS properties, so you can easily overwrite them from Code Injection to change background colors, text colors, and more.
The theme comes with 5 different color schemes, the default one can be set in the admin using the Default color scheme in Settings > Design > Site-Wide.
The included color schemes:
- light
- dark
- midnight
- ivory
- skyblue
The default option is system
which will be either the dark
or light
theme,
depending on the user's preference.
It's possible to change the color schemes by changing the properties. This can be done by adding the following in Code Injection and adjusting the values.
To change the light theme:
<style>
:root {
/* color configuration */
--color-text: hsl(0 0% 15%);
--color-text-acc: hsl(0 0% 25%);
--color-text-reverse: hsl(0 0% 85%);
--color-bg: hsl(0 100% 100%);
--color-bg-acc: hsl(0 0% 97%);
--color-bg-reverse: hsl(0 0% 15%);
--color-bg-base: 0 0% 100%;
--color-bg-base-reverse: 0 0% 0%;
--color-neutral: hsl(0 0% 50%);
--color-border: hsl(0 0% 92%);
}
</style>
To change the dark theme:
<style>
html[data-color-scheme='dark'] {
--color-text: hsl(0 0% 85%);
--color-text-acc: hsl(0 0% 75%);
--color-text-reverse: hsl(0 0% 15%);
--color-bg: hsl(0 100% 100%);
--color-bg-acc: hsl(0 0% 97%);
--color-bg-reverse: hsl(0 0% 15%);
--color-bg-base: 0 0% 100%;
--color-bg-base-reverse: 0 0% 0%;
--color-neutral: hsl(0 0% 50%);
--color-border: hsl(0 0% 20%);
}
</style>
To change the midnight theme:
<style>
[data-color-scheme='midnight'] {
--color-text: hsl(250 63% 90%);
--color-text-acc: hsl(250 63% 85%);
--color-text-reverse: hsl(250 63% 10%);
--color-bg: hsl(250 63% 10%);
--color-bg-acc: hsl(250 63% 20%);
--color-bg-reverse: hsl(250 63% 90%);
--color-bg-base: 250 63% 0%;
--color-bg-base-reverse: 250 63% 100%;
--color-neutral: hsl(250 63% 50%);
--color-border: hsl(250 63% 25%);
}
</style>
To change the ivory theme:
<style>
[data-color-scheme='ivory'] {
--color-text: hsl(34 36% 10%);
--color-text-acc: hsl(34 36% 15%);
--color-text-reverse: hsl(34 36% 90%);
--color-bg: hsl(34 36% 90%);
--color-bg-acc: hsl(34 36% 85%);
--color-bg-reverse: hsl(34 36% 10%);
--color-bg-base: 34 36% 100%;
--color-bg-base-reverse: 34 36% 0%;
--color-neutral: hsl(34 36% 50%);
--color-border: hsl(34 36% 75%);
}
</style>
To change the midnight theme:
<style>
[data-color-scheme='skyblue'] {
--color-text: hsl(210 100% 10%);
--color-text-acc: hsl(210 100% 15%);
--color-text-reverse: hsl(210 100% 90%);
--color-bg: hsl(210 100% 92%);
--color-bg-acc: hsl(210 100% 88%);
--color-bg-reverse: hsl(210 100% 10%);
--color-bg-base: 210 100% 50%;
--color-bg-base-reverse: 210 100% 50%;
--color-neutral: hsl(210 100% 50%);
--color-border: hsl(210 100% 86%);
}
</style>
Some useful tools for choosing colors and gradients:
You can even define your color schemes, but that would require changing the theme files. Steps to define new color schemes:
- Change the package.json file, adding a new option under the
color_scheme
property. - Add the new color scheme to the dropdown editing the
partials/color-scheme-dropdown.hbs
- Add the CSS, either in Code Injection (using the previous code blocks as a template) or in the CSS files.
Syntax Highlighting
The theme comes with prism.js integration by default,
to activate syntax highlighting just add the internal tag #syntax-highlight
to your post.
Why is this necessary? In short, for performance. To avoid loading the library when it's not necessary. If you don't add the tag, the library will not load at all.
If you are someone who shares code regularly and wants to have the plugin on all
your posts, without having to add the tag, you can do so by changing the
partials/syntax-highlight.hbs
file. Simply remove the condition checking for the tag.
Additionally, in this partial file, it's defined which version of the prism library is loaded as well as the components, languages, and theme. So you can easily customize it, add new languages, or a different code highlighting the theme without having to go into theme development.
Table of Contents
Table of contents are generated using the TocBot library and this is integrated into the theme by default. You can use the ToC functionality in two ways:
- Using the With Table Of Contents And Sidebar template.
- Using the internal tag
#toc
.
With the first option, you get a fixed Table of Contents on the left side next to the post content and also a sidebar on the right. (You can select this template for any post in the Post Settings menu in the Admin).
With the second option, you get a floating ToC on the top-right part of the website, with this option you can add a Table of Contents to any template you are using.
If you want to make changes to the ToC layout or the TocBot library configuration,
you can edit the partials/toc.hbs
file.
Fonts
Note
You can use Ghost custom fonts to set the heading and body fonts for your site. This can be done from Settings > Design > Brand > Typography. The theme comes with some additional fonts you can use, for this you have to set the Theme default option in the Ghost custom font settings.
You can set the font family from the Admin section, going to Settings > Design > Site-wide and under Font family select one of the options.
The theme comes with the following options:
- System font - the default value, loads the system font (no requests to Google Fonts)
- Literata & Inter - Literata for headings and Inter for the body font
- Inter - Inter for both headings and body
- Bitter - Bitter for both headings and body font
- Outfit - Outfit for both headings and body font
- Space Grotesk - Space Grotesk for both headings and body font
- Inconsolata - Inconsolata for both headings and body font
Tip
With the System font option, you can avoid requests to the Google servers in case GDPR is a concern.
If you still want to use Google fonts and want to self-host the font files check out this guide for self-hosting Google Fonts.
Ghost config
Some configurations in Ghost themes can be defined in the package.json
file, including
Posts per page, Image sizes, and Custom settings.
Posts per page
The posts_per_page
defines the number of posts that appear in your collections until it's paginated.
For example, the value of posts_per_page
is used on the home page, tag, and author templates.
You can change it in the package.json
file:
"config": {
"posts_per_page": 12
}
Image sizes
Ghost can handle responsive image sizes,
and this is defined in the package.json
file, under the image_sizes
property.
You can change the default configuration by editing this file before uploading the theme.
"image_sizes": {
"xxs": {
"width": 30
},
"xs": {
"width": 100
},
"s": {
"width": 320
},
"m": {
"width": 640
},
"l": {
"width": 960
},
"xl": {
"width": 1280
},
"xxl": {
"width": 2000
}
}
The sizes defined will be used to generate copies of images at the specified sizes when uploading images in your Ghost Admin.
Comments
The theme uses the native Ghost comment feature. The Native Comment System requires at least Ghost v5.9.0, you have to enable it from Settings > Membership > Access > Commenting.
Here are the options you can choose from:
All members
- Logged-in membersPaid-members only
- Only logged-in members with an active subscriptionNobody
- Disable commenting completely
Icons
The icons used in the theme are from Tabler Icons, the library consists of 5000+ icons.
Only the icons used in the theme are included in the partials/icons
directory
in separate .hbs
files.
Here are the steps to add new icons:
- Go to Tabler Icons and click on the Icon you want to add, this will copy the code to your clipboard.
- Go into the
partials/icons
directory and create a new file:your-icon.hbs
- Open the new file and paste the copied code from the clipboard.
- Save the file.
For using the icons inside the theme files, there is a special partial file
partials/icon.hbs
which accepts name and size as parameters.
Let's see an example and try to add a new icon. Assuming we want to add the icon
camera
and by clicking on the icon on the website, we get this code:
<svg xmlns="http://www.w3.org/2000/svg" class="icon icon-tabler icon-tabler-camera" width="24" height="24" viewBox="0 0 24 24" strokeWidth="1.5" stroke="#2c3e50" fill="none" strokeLinecap="round" strokeLinejoin="round">
<path stroke="none" d="M0 0h24v24H0z" fill="none"/>
<path d="M5 7h1a2 2 0 0 0 2 -2a1 1 0 0 1 1 -1h6a1 1 0 0 1 1 1a2 2 0 0 0 2 2h1a2 2 0 0 1 2 2v9a2 2 0 0 1 -2 2h-14a2 2 0 0 1 -2 -2v-9a2 2 0 0 1 2 -2" />
<circle cx="12" cy="13" r="3" />
</svg>
The next step is to create a new file: partials/icons/camera.hbs
and paste the copied code in the file.
The new file must be of .hbs
type, so we can use it into the theme files:
{{>icon name="camera"}}
Social links
Social links are shown in the footer and by default, the theme comes with:
- Facebook (Settings > General > Social accounts)
- Twitter (Settings > General > Social accounts)
- RSS
To add other links you need to edit the partials/social-links.hbs
file.
There are several other links in there already, you just have to uncomment
the relevant parts and add your link in the href
attribute.
Social sharing
Social sharing is part of the post layout and the following is included:
- X(Twitter)
- Bluesky
- Copy to clipboard
To add other social sharing options you need to edit the partials/social-share.hbs
file.
Translations
By default, everything is in English (en.json
), additionally, the theme comes with translations in:
- 🇩🇪 German (
de.json
) - 🇪🇸 Spanish (
es.json
) - 🇫🇷 French (
fr.json
) - 🇮🇹 Italian (
it.json
) - 🇳🇱 Dutch (
nl.json
) - 🇵🇹 Portuguese (
pt.json
)
Note
For a translation to apply, you have to set the language in Settings > General Settings > Publication language.
If you want to edit the translation in a specific language, you have to edit the corresponding translation file.
The files are stored in the locales
directory (inside the theme zip).
|__ locales
| |__ de.json
| |__ en.json
| |__ es.json
| |__ fr.json
If the language file for your language doesn't exist, you have to create it (make sure to use the correct language code)
The best way is to copy the content en.json
file in your new language file, then change the translations.
Theme development
If you want to make more advanced changes to the theme, or you want to develop your components, the theme comes with a developer-friendly setup. You can take advantage of the Gulp tasks that are set up for compiling Javascript and PostCSS.
All the assets are combined and minified for better speed and performance. To customize the theme make sure you have Node.js and npm installed.
Follow the official guide for installing Ghost locally.
After you have installed Ghost and put the theme directory inside the content/themes/
directory, run the following commands in the theme directory:
npm install
This will install all the dependencies for the theme
Then run:
gulp
This will compile PostCSS and javascript and will watch for changes. So when you edit a .hbs
, .css
or .js
file the change will trigger the gulp watch
task and this will compile the assets whenever you change a file.
If you want to compile just CSS:
gulp css
If you want to compile just JS:
gulp js
Code Snippets
Frequently asked questions and useful snippets you can use to make some quick changes to your site.
-
How to resize the header logo?
Go to the Admin, Settings > Code Injection and in the Site Header add (adjust the height value depending on your preference):
<style>.header__brand img { height: 42px; }</style>
-
How to resize the footer logo?
Go to the Admin, Settings > Code Injection and in the Site Header add (adjust the height value depending on your preference):
<style>.footer__brand img { height: 50px; }</style>
-
How to remove the color scheme dropdown?
Go to the Admin, Settings > Code Injection and in the Site Header add:
<style>.color-scheme { display: none; }</style>