A tool to help theme developers create better demo sites

So, while creating a new theme demo site for one of my Ghost theme’s, I thought “Ughh…this is tedious”.

See, as somebody who loves good design, I hate it when it’s destroyed by Lorem Ipsum content. So, I always try to put realistic content onto my theme demo sites. Something that tells a story – and actually demonstrates how it can be used.

Let me introduce: Myrtle (yes, after the moaning Ghost)

A CLI tool specifically for Ghost theme developers that uses OpenAI’s GPT-3.5-turbo to generate and publish content for your demo sites.

With Myrtle, you can:

  • Generate static pages (e.g., About, Services, etc.)
  • Define categories/tags and generate a specified number of posts per tag
  • Upload all this content directly to your theme’s demo Ghost instance

Here’s a brief overview of how Myrtle works:

  1. Set up the environment by providing your URL and API keys, which will be stored locally for future use.
  2. Feed the tool some information about the theme you want to populate with content.
  3. Wait a bit as Myrtle generates the content and uploads it to your specified demo site via Ghost’s Admin API.

Now, let’s talk about the obvious elephant in the room: the content it generates will be bland. Yes. But the goal with this is not to replace human creativity and writing, but to take a task of theme developer’s hands.

Here’s what I have done with it for the demo site of a theme I create:

jannis@local myrtle % myrtle create

? What would you like to name your site? Olena Hordiyenko

? What kind of theme would you like to create? (e.g. blog, portfolio, newsletter) service provider

? Describe your theme in a few sentences (this is important for OpenAI to generate relevant content): Olena Hordiyenko is a fictional Ukrainian content repurposing specialist. She is using her webite to sell her 
services to small service-based businnesses and uses her blog to educate business owners about repurposing their content

? Enter the titles of all the static pages you want to create (comma separated): Contact, Services, Working With Me

? Enter the titles of all the categories you want to create (comma separated): Content Formats, Everyday Content Creation

? Enter number of posts per category (titles and content will be auto-generated): 3

✔ Content for page/post "Contact" generated successfully.
✔ Content for page/post "Services" generated successfully.
✔ Content for page/post "Working With Me" generated successfully.
✔ Post titles generated successfully.
✔ Content for page/post "Maximize Your Reach: How Repurposing Content Can Skyrocket Your Business's Online Presence" generated successfully.
✔ Content for page/post "Unlock the Power of Content Formats: 5 Strategies That Will Transform Your Marketing Efforts" generated successfully.
✔ Content for page/post "The Ultimate Content Repurposing Guide: Expert Tips to Boost Your Business's Visibility and Drive Sales" generated successfully.
✔ Post titles generated successfully.
✔ Content for page/post "Unleashing the Power of Repurposing: How to Maximize Your Content Creation Efforts and Boost Your Business" generated successfully.
✔ Content for page/post "From One to Many: The Art of Repurposing Content to Reach and Engage a Wider Audience" generated successfully.
✔ Content for page/post "Content Repurposing Secrets Revealed: The Key to Consistent Quality and Efficiency in your Marketing Strategy" generated successfully.
✔ All content pushed to Ghost successfully.

As you can see on the demo site’s blog, I obviously had to edit some stuff a bit (and add pictures). The titles GPT-3.5 generated were way too long. Now, the prompting can be improved in the future, but generally, this tool has cut a task that would take quite some manual work to 2-3 minutes + some editing.

First time I am publishing a small tool like this – so, let me know what you think!

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