I’m setting up a website for a new nonprofit. I plan to use posts for reports that we publish, for collecting articles that appear in the press, and occasional announcements. But the nonprofit has a single project (with its own website), and I need the post about that to be the most prominent thing on the homepage, and to also include the excerpt. Some of the default themes can highlight the latest post by putting it in a larger section. Are any designed to do this for one or more featured posts?
Ghost is new to me, and I understand that the design is driven by the theme, but it seems strange that none of the included themes can really do anything with featured posts. Is my intended use case supposed to be possible with a stock installation? If not, which theme should I chose to customize myself?
Among the numerous approaches I tried: Source with the “Highlight” header type and “show featured posts” turned on. But this is not about prominence: it’s to add a separated “featured posts” section after the chronological one.
I was able to get past this more easily than I had feared. I got good results using Fantasma to build a custom theme. There, you can have any number of ‘posts list’ sections, and it lets you set the ‘posts source’ to these: routes, featured, related or custom. So, in my case, the first posts list is for featured, and then the second can be custom with something like “featured:false”.
A default theme has to be kept simple, but perhaps the really helpful idea that could be extracted from this is: allow the user to toggle on a second posts list, yes, but with some flexibility, where both can be set to “everything,” “featured” or “custom,” as needed. Maybe that ends up bringing in a lot of other user-configurable options that have to also be there for it to work well.
Thank you to the devs for all your efforts.
Cannot comment for the others but Source has no featured post. Who know why? That said it’s nice to meet another Fantasma fan. Use the post sections to break up your tags. The custom post setting then post filter tag:nameofyourtag allows you to create something otherwise not available in the free themes. I’m currently building out 2 sites with Fantasma and no one would ever know they were the Source theme! ;)
Fantasma allows non devs to achieve levels of design only usually afforded to the devs or a user with $$$ to pay for one. Fantasma eliminates that time and cost.
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