Hi,
My blog is historical, and I migrated it recently to Ghost. I’ve had to modify some of the formatting on some of the posts, but I want the date under the title to be the original date, not the date I fixed a formatting issue.
I’m not seeing a setting for that. Any suggestions?
You will need to change that in your theme files, there is unfortunately no option in the Ghost admin panel itself.
There are a few different date options for posts:
Please share which theme you are using, so we can point you in the right direction 
Thank you.
I’m currently using ease. I’m not sure it’s exactly what I want, but good enough to get started!
My plan was to go through and fix all the migration errors before going live.
I’m not sure how to find my theme files – I’m using Ghost Pro hosting.
Ease does display the updated_at. I think the premise is that it’s for documentation, and updated_at is important. If you’re not attached to Ease particularly, you might want to try another theme. For example, Source displays published_at dates. (And without checking, I’d guess that majority of themes do.)
If you do want to edit Ease, you can find the option to download it from within the “change theme” part of settings - it’ll be under ‘installed’, and then I think the download is under the three dots. I highly recommend setting up to do local development if you decide to edit the theme. While you /can/ edit the theme and upload each change to Ghost Pro, it gets tedious fast. I use WSL on Windows, and it works great for theme development.
Ok. Thank you.
I don’t remember why I chose Ease (I started this migration several months ago), but I think it was the least divergent from how I wanted the site to look – I would really prefer to have a front page with links that doesn’t have new post listings filling up the page. I don’t think I found anything that really fit my vision well.
I’m a little worried that messing with choosing themes again will undo all the customization I already specified.
I guess I had better start figuring out the local development. I’m on a Mac.
It looks like maybe I can download the theme (Ease), modify it locally, and re-upload it without having to commit to developing everything locally?
I’m still having a hard time figuring out the entire step-by-step process for how local development works. I’m not averse to doing it, but I have a lot of other things on my plate right now, and I was hoping to keep my learning another skillset for website maintenance to a minimum so I can focus on writing.
Edit: no, I misunderstood. This option does entail full local development. Ok.
You should definitely be able to download the theme, make your very small edit, ZIP it, and re-upload it. No extra software required, assuming you already have software that makes .zip files. (You probably do.)
You’d need a fuller install if you wanted to preview your work, or if you needed to run ‘gulp’ or ‘rollup’ for processing your files. But if you’re just swapping out published_at and updated_at, you can do that in notepad. Seriously.
I am embarrassed to say I need much more basic instructions.
I managed to install Ghost on my machine with the right version of node and all that, and I’m comfortable using git.
But what I’m not understanding is how to get the actual contents of my site, which is currently hosted on Ghost (and not yet deployed, because I’m trying to fix a bunch of migration errors and tweak the theme) into my local repository, and how to sync back to the host once I’ve made changes. I’ve poked around in other parts of the forum, but I’m struggling to find out how to initialize that and the basic ongoing development process. 
I’m totally happy to edit just the theme and reupload it! but I don’t understand the very basic thing of how to send a file to the site.
Ah. So you did more work than you really needed to, but the payoff is that you can now test your theme edits locally, which is much faster than uploading and then discovering you missed a quote or something. :)
Directions below assume you are going to run locally.
Download the theme - the tutorial you linked has directions with images for exactly what to click. Do all of that on your server’s Ghost install :) If you’re stuck on the download, please elaborate on where.
Once you’ve got the zip file downloaded to your local computer, you’re going to open up Ghost in your browser. (Ghost is probably at http://localhost:2368/ghost , unless you told it to do something else on install.) Then follow the directions for how to upload the theme on your LOCAL install. That’ll cause your local Ghost install to unzip the theme and load it into Ghost.
Find the folder - it’s going to be at content/themes/yourthemename , relative to whatever folder Ghost is running in.
You can make your edits on the .hbs files there. You can check how it looks on your local Ghost install as you make edits. (If you add new .hbs files, you’ll need to restart Ghost, but just editing them shouldn’t require a restart.)
** If you are editing the theme’s css and js, you may need to run your theme’s build process, but nothing you described originally requires that **
When everything is exactly how you want it locally, follow the tutorial you linked above to download the edited theme .zip file from your local Ghost. Then follow the tutorial directions to upload the edited theme file to your server Ghost.
It’s possible (and pretty awesome) to set up your theme in github with actions so that you can push your theme to github and have it get deployed on your server, but that’s absolutely an extra layer of complexity that you can skip for now, if you just want to make a couple tiny tweaks.
I’m not sure I understand what you’re asking here. What are you asking here? :)
Sorry. It’s probably so obvious that it’s hard to imagine I’m really asking that! 
The issue is, suppose I download the theme and find the spot to change “updated_at” to “published_at”.
Now, how do I send that edited file to be the one that my ghost account uses? My local machine doesn’t know where on the whole vast internet that file is supposed to go. What I haven’t figured out is how to deploy things from my local copies.
I think maybe the answer is in here: https://github.com/TryGhost/action-deploy-theme!
But also, since it’s just a tiny edit, I think I can use the “Upload a theme in Ghost Admin” option instead of configuring for local development. I’ll try it.
1000 thank yous for your patient help with this!
Also, I was worried that without downloading all my site content into my local Ghost, if I changed something in the theme and uploaded, it might overwrite the content to be empty.
Ah, nope. The theme upload is totally separate from the content.
You’re going to upload the whole theme, not just that one file. That’s the part where you either zip the folder and upload it (following the theme upload directions), or you download the theme from your local install and then upload it.
Got it.
And sweet! It worked.
Thank you again!