Hi all,
I’d like to share a personal project: Ectobuilder, a visual theme builder for Ghost.
Full disclosure up front: it’s mine, and it has a paid plan. I’m posting it as a showcase and to ask for honest feedback, not as an ad.
Why I built it
It started out of my own need. I run a few small products and blogs, and I wanted to publish beautiful websites for them, fast. Every time, I ended up either bending an existing theme or spending days in Handlebars and CSS. So I built the tool I was missing.
I’ve also tried Fantasma by Priority Vision. It’s a genuinely polished product, and a great choice if you want to customise Ghost’s Source theme visually. My needs were different: I wanted to build completely custom themes from scratch, with my own layouts for every page, so I kept working on my own tool.
I use it for my own sites every day. The Ectobuilder website is itself a Ghost site, and every page of it was built with Ectobuilder and deployed straight to Ghost. So is the site for Penlo, one of my other products, which you’ll see in the GIFs below.
How it works
Click any text, picture or button and change it right on the page (walkthrough). Pick from nearly 300 ready sections. Design all seven Ghost pages (home, post list, post, page, tag, author, 404) plus your own custom templates.
What comes out is a standard Ghost theme. It uses Ghost’s own data for posts, tags, authors, members, newsletters and tiers, and it passes gscan.
Pre-built themes
If you’d rather not start from a blank page, there are 17 finished themes:
- Blogs: Magazine, Newsletter, Food Blog, Podcast
- Portfolios: Writer Portfolio, Wedding Photographer
- Local businesses: Language Tutor, Florist, Real Estate Agent, Dentist, Architecture Studio, Yoga Studio, Restaurant, Psychotherapist, Nail Salon, Personal Trainer, Barber Shop
You can preview each one in full before you start. The collection is growing.
Pricing, plainly
It’s free to use. Design, edit and preview as much as you like.
You only need a paid plan when you’re ready to take the theme out:
- Deploy through the Ghost Admin API (recommended): one click and the theme is live on your site. No zip files, no uploads.
- Download the zip and upload it yourself. It’s a normal Ghost theme and works on any Ghost site.
Features
Roughly in the order I think people care about most. Each one links to a guide that explains it in detail.
- Contact forms. Paste a free Web3Forms key and every message lands in your inbox.
- Dropdown menus, managed in Ghost. Group links under a parent in Ghost’s own Navigation settings. The header shows them as a dropdown or a wide menu, on phones too.
- Comments, your way. Ghost’s own comments, or Disqus, Giscus, Hyvor Talk or Cusdis, with one setting.
- Search and filters for the post list: a search bar, topic and date filters, and sorting.
- Table of contents built from your headings. It highlights where the reader is.
Dark mode switch. Visitors pick light or dark. The dark palette is made from your brand colour. Here it is on penlo.app:
- Landing pages from custom templates. Design a template visually, then pick it in Ghost’s Template menu. Ectobuilder can create the Ghost page for you when you deploy.
- Pricing pages. Show your Ghost tiers, or a designed pricing table with a monthly/yearly switch. Buttons open Ghost’s checkout, or Stripe, PayPal, Lemon Squeezy, Paddle, Polar or Dodo Payments links.
- SEO, speed and privacy.
- Breadcrumbs and structured data.
- Optimised images and fonts that don’t block the page.
- A page speed test inside the editor.
- A cookie banner that holds back analytics, pixels, comments and embeds until visitors agree.
- Redirects and 404 monitoring. See which missing addresses people still visit, including old links after a migration and made-up URLs that AI assistants invent, with visit counts. Redirect any of them in one click.
- Lightbox for pictures and galleries, with captions, swipe and arrow keys.
- Tag icons to mark premium, video or podcast posts, coloured by the tag’s colour in Ghost.
- Online booking. “Book a time” buttons open Calendly, Cal.com or Google Calendar, as a pop-up or in a new tab.
- Analytics with Google Analytics 4, Plausible, Fathom, Umami or Meta Pixel. Paste an ID; no theme code.
- Substack-style
/p/links, so old links keep working if you move from Substack. - Free stock photos from Unsplash, right in the editor.
- AI, if you want it. An MCP connector lets Claude, ChatGPT or Gemini edit the same theme you see in the editor, and draft and publish posts. Drafts stay drafts, and it never emails subscribers unless you tell it to.
Integrations at a glance
| What | Works with |
|---|---|
| Forms | Web3Forms |
| Comments | Ghost, Disqus, Giscus, Hyvor Talk, Cusdis |
| Bookings | Calendly, Cal.com, Google Calendar |
| Analytics | Google Analytics 4, Plausible, Fathom, Umami, Meta Pixel |
| Payments | Ghost tiers (Stripe), PayPal, Lemon Squeezy, Paddle, Polar, Dodo Payments |
| Photos | Unsplash |
| AI assistants (MCP) | Claude, ChatGPT, Gemini |
| What AI can do | Build and restyle themes and pages, write and edit posts and pages, add images, schedule and publish posts, deploy the theme, and take screenshots to check its own work |
| Publishing | Ghost Admin API, or zip download |
If you decide to go beyond the free plan, the code GHOSTFORUM takes 30% off your first year (for the first 50 people, until 29 November).
I’d love your feedback
You can try it at https://www.ectobuilder.com.
I’d especially like to hear from this community:
- What’s missing?
- What’s confusing?
- What have you had to hack into your own theme that a tool like this should handle?
Happy to answer questions about how it works under the hood, too. Thanks for reading!
