Was it Marcus Aurealis who said, “Life is too short for default settings”? This week’s question focuses on customization. Or, in other words:
How do you make your Ghost site your own?
We want to hear about the features you add, custom themes you use, or tweaks you make. What are the things you do to make your site stand out on the web?
We’d also be remiss if we didn’t mention that customization should never happen at the expense of content. Time and again, the hallmark of successful publishers and creators is always great content, delivered consistently.
Our community is a treasure trove of knowledge, experience, and creativity, especially when it comes to using Ghost. Questions of the week are an opportunity to share and learn from these resources.
Miss our previous questions? Check them out below!
Well, talking of Snippets, content snippets in the Ghost editor are a big boost to productivity and consistency.
Having a pre-written block of reusable content shared across the site with all authors allows teams to keep on message with minimal effort. Quick to set up, quicker to use, every time I’ve introduced someone to the feature they have been delighted
This looks interesting! Where are you working on the widget? Is there a public repo where people can contribute? It might be a good candidate to make as a custom web component.
I started with a paid theme that has a lot of similarities to Source, which didn’t exist at the time. But now I have a fallback if my theme grows too old.
I then added:
A Dark Mode – a very fun project.
Several post templates, including taking the TOC idea from the Ghost Tutorial and putting it into a template so it can be applied only when appropriate. This involved an epic journey through the intricacies of element positioning that was educational and annoying.
I also made a basic “please subscribe to the site” template that can work on any post.
I made a template for a set of articles that are all on one topic that has some more complex customized text for members/subscribers and changes the way the other posts are displayed
I have a heap of snippets for text content, and for subscribe banners and buttons. This is really useful when you have staff writers who do not at all want to try to make these things themselves.
Also, this is really handy if someone else is writing a post later and they need a bit of content written by me. I can just go make it in a snippet and they can add it when they actually do the post.
I wish we could do saved code injection snippets.
I added a JS library to allow me to post sortable tables.
I actually built an announcement banner that I like better than the site designed one – it remembers if you’ve turned it off.
Things I’d like to do: figure out how to display PDFs within a post.
Make more templates – seriously one of the most interesting aspects of using Ghost is the ability to make more than one type of post and have authors need to know nothing to use it but how to click in a dropdown. I’d like to try something even more innovative than the TOC one.
Implemented a server-side Node.js API to access the Ghost database (on the same server) and return recently commented posts, most commented posts, and most liked comments for the week or for all-time. This surfaces older content if there is a new comment, and members can see what the most popular discussions are.