Add theme component functionality to allow more convenient template editing

[t1-tracey]

Right now, if you want to make additional customisations to a template on top of a theme, you have to edit your copy of the theme.

I am guessing that you would also need to keep making those edits each time the base theme is updated, by downloading the base theme again, editing it, and re-uploading your own copy.

E.g. if you want to hide the subscribe buttons on the Casper theme, you would need to edit HBS files in the Casper zip.

Ghost 4.0 - Really Terrible for Personal Blog

If you don’t want subscribe buttons you can remove them from your theme quite easily. For Casper it’s a case of editing two files to remove some small parts: After that you have your standard blog with no member-related functionality visible if you turn off the portal button in your admin settings.

And here are other cases where if you want to override templates, you need to edit the files accepting that they’ll be overridden with each update again.

Subscription-related wording is illogical and Ghost-biased

Unless I’m completely mistaken, I edited the theme file for this (think it was subscription.hbs) and replaced the placeholders.

Same with editing email templates:

Email Template Customization

Hey guys, you can edit the 3 templates for the transactional emails called: signin.js signup.js subscribe.js path: /var/www/ghost/versions/3.18.1/core/server/services/members/emails/* Note: Those are core files and will be overwritten on ghost updates (so make backups) Restart ghost after editing the files

Email Template Customization

I am on 3.25.0 version and the template to edit for newsletters is /var/www/ghost/current/core/server/services/mega/template.js

And Casper: How to move text up into main image? - #2 by Stromfeldt

I am aware that Ghost has code injection but these appear to apply only to the header and footer.

I know that Discourse, for example, has theme component functionality which allows you to override templates. You copy the contents of a whole template into a theme component, edit or remove parts, and those changes will remain intact when the theme component is used with a theme. The theme can be updated independently of the theme component.

Allowing people to use theme components would make it more convenient, at least, to make changes that they may not want to have from Ghost core themes and others’ themes.

[thebear.dev]

I downloaded “Dawn” and changed the theme name and everything related to it. I have no idea if doing so means that it will not be updated when the original theme is updated or not, but it might be worth looking into.