Hey,
I took a look at a number of themes and I noticed not a single one have Categories Dropdowns. Why is that? Attached is an image I designed and looking to implement in Dawn w/ the help of a theme developer.
Ideally, when you press the “Update List” button, the list updates in real-time (no page reloading) like when you press the “LOAD MORE” button.
I don’t mind paying a theme developer to have this done, and why is there not a single theme with Categories Dropdown?
Hello @titus. I understand what you mean, but to me, what you want to do is typically an overkill. If you avec categories (tags), why not using the navigation to display them ? Simplicity is key. 
@Titus - here are a couple of my themes that provide navigation elements for tags or categories . . .
What you are asking for is not very difficult for most any Ghost theme developer.
this is really weird but original to me, i love it, especially opening posts and how they are displayed. is this theme free?
@giacomosilli Thanks! For making that theme I bought the Blockster Theme on Creative Market and then modified it (a lot, as you can see!)
The original Blockster Theme came with the neat isotope effect, and has lots of other built-in bells and whistles for making fun navigation bits. Pixel and Kraft really went crazy when they built this theme back in the early days of Ghost! Here is their demo portal…
Thanks for letting me discover this gallery.
I really appreciate your changes, it is the version I prefer the most.
I’m not sure why when you open a post you create an iframe of your own site to view it, however congratulations.
MicroChic is a perfect example and only theme I’ve seen to have this. What happened to the developers? They are not around anymore. 
@giacomosilli - can you describe a more preferable way (other than iframes) to pop up (or zoom forward) the page content on top of the index page and into the user’s focus?
As you point out, I am currently using an iframe in a modal window to pop it up.
I can also use a slide in, as demonstrated on the last (or earliest) post of that MicroChic site – the post titled “DENVER GEEKS” – when I want to bring in an external website or web page. This slide-in also brings the content inside an iframe.
I would appreciate any ideas you have for other ways to do this…
@Titus I did make contact with them a couple of years ago, just after I purchased the Blockster theme, to ask them about updating it for compatibility with the current Ghost version at that time. They were very kind in response, but never followed through. So I updated it myself. I think they were just on to other things, having a family, etc. and working on new, different projects.
Yeah that would be a cool feature. Microchips site is like something out of Baldur’s Gate.
@Beric - Thanks Beric - I’m just getting started! Navigation on MicroChic’s Ghost blog will keep getting even more (as @giacomosilli called it) “weird” as time goes on!
i think it is possible to simulate the style of the iframe simply using a div, with some js for animation
you can use something like modals
maybe you use the iframe just to open some sites that allow you to do so.
@giacomosilli can you point me to any working example code for this method?
(It seems we’ve wandered a bit off-topic here – from “Dropdowns” to “Popups” 
Yes, perhaps it is better to talk about it privately or in another topic
I don’t mind.
I’m just sitting over here trying to figure out what bits from that theme I need to grab (for sorting and filtering), so I can apply it to the Dawn theme. I was going to pay someone to do it, but I want this to be open so theme devs can incorporate something similar in their themes.
@Titus – I was thinking those very same things when I first found the Blockster theme.
I ended up deciding to purchase the theme and dig into the code. Since I am more of a theme builder than a coder, I thought it would be a fun learning adventure.
I could not have been more right. Starting with updating it to work with current Ghost, then bit-by-bit reverse engineering it by studying the code and experimenting with plugging bits of code into other themes.
After now more than a year, this quest continues to provide me with endless learning and fun challenges.
We just released a theme that has the simple version of this feature, a dropdown that links to the different tags.
Initially I had a more complex implementation in mind, something like this:
And the implementation is not that had like @denvergeeks said. You can read the posts using the ghost API with the set filters quite easily. But the problem appears when you have complex post cards, you want to have optimized images and so on, because then you have to handle all those things from javascript.
This can be done of course, but in the end I thought it’s not worth it and went with the simpler implementation as @Mathieu_Rouault said simplicity is key.
But I am thinking of creating a blog post about this and share the code I used.
I also noticed that categories/tags were missing from themes’ homepages. which is why my newest theme CodeWire has a “Tags cloud” section. Doing it with a dropdown is also a nice idea, I like @bironthemes approach. Let me know if you are interested in the code, I will be happy to share.
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