Fantasma: Ghost's Source Theme on Steroids 💪 - Visual Builder

Hey everyone :waving_hand:

We just launched Fantasma and wanted to share it here.

A visual builder for Ghost themes. You customize sections, spacing, colors, fonts - then export a normal Ghost theme ZIP.

A little story:

Started as a weekend project. The plan: make a few configurable sections with Source theme look, package it up, see if anyone finds it useful.

Then we got carried away.

“Let’s add section settings” became “what if sections could contain blocks?” which turned into “okay but what if blocks could contain OTHER blocks?” And suddenly we’d built a full visual builder with section presets, spacings, colors, and way more features than we planned.

What you can actually do:

  • Build visually with pre-made sections and blocks

  • Live preview as you work

  • Customize all the standard templates (home, post, page, tag, author)

  • Control width, spacing, alignment per section

  • Pick from curated color schemes and font pairings

  • One-click export → download ZIP → upload to Ghost

Free and no account needed:

Just start building. It saves in your browser. Sign in if you want multiple projects and cloud sync.

What’s next:

Right now you can customize the standard templates. We want to add support for custom post/page templates, custom collections, and eventually more advanced blocks and sections.

Beta disclaimer:

This is public beta. The features work, we’re using it ourselves, but we’ll ship carefully. We’ll try hard not to break your projects. If we need migrations, we’ll do them gracefully.

Real feedback wanted:

If you try it, tell us:

  • What did you build first?

  • What sections are missing?

  • Where did it feel confusing or limiting?

Try it: https://www.fantasma.io/

Built because we wanted it to exist. Hope you find it useful too.

10 Likes

Hi there,

Congratulations! It’s looks very promising. I loved to see many premade sections. Here are some thoughts:

  • It would be great to be able to change/add 404 page as well.
  • The preview section occasionally breaks (the latest version of macOS Safari). It looks as if the styles haven’t loaded at all. But when I check in the developer tools, I don’t see any failed requests or any error reports. Screenshot below
  • Is there a way to continue on my previous work, after download it? I couldn’t find an “import” section.
  • Can this be used as a generic ghost theme editor in the future? Do you see a possibility like that?

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Thank you for reporting the Safari bug. It should now work correctly :+1:

Error templates will be editable later when we add support for more templates.

Your current project is saved in the browser. You can’t import or export the project file - only export the ready-to-use theme zip file. However, you can sign up and save projects in your account:

Our builder requires a specific set of configs and templates. It’s not a classic theme editor, so it can’t work with any theme right now. If users show interest in building themes with it, we’ll probably add that possibility. In its current state, I’m not sure yet where this builder will go. We want to create customizable advanced blocks, so themes will likely become a set of configs that reuse existing blocks with the ability to change design system variables.

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I’m intrigued to learn what comes with the premium paid version? :upside_down_face:

2 Likes

Right now, we’re focused on polishing and finishing the free version of our builder. We need to create a solid foundation that satisfies both us and our users first. Only then will we consider paid features.

The paid version will likely include all features available in our premium themes (https://www.priority.vision/), such as dark/light mode, table of contents, featured videos, etc… It will also offer advanced sections and blocks like carousels, galleries, marketing sections, popups, forms, etc… The list of advanced features is extensive and may include many capabilities found in other popular builders (Squarespace, Framer, Gutenberg, etc.). However, development priorities depend on user interest. If users want feature ‘A’ more than feature ‘B’, we’ll prioritize developing ‘A’ when possible.

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I have tested it and I am amazed - wondering if it will provide the same performance as the other themes you have.

I would definitely buy the PRO version if I could implement features as ToC, etc.

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Maybe another round of feedback:

  • You should add a secondary accent colour to allow more customization - otherwise it looks like everything is same-coloured
  • Font selection - its quite low and make a big difference on the branding of a blog
  • ToC to the blog posts
  • Add more page templates (directory, resources)

I would buy a premium version immediately if you could implement this

How is it about the performance? What does google analytics said about the template that are exported? Did you check it out?

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I second all that, esp the colours and TOC’s.

I know they are working on this.

To anyone else who has not looked at it, please do. I’m aware a lot of dev’s use the forum but if you are a DIY Ghost user, this could be a game changer for Ghost. Please try it out and offer them feedback.

Elements from their other themes will be made available on premium plan, so worth every penny.

This theme will only stay available if folk are using it! If not it becomes dust.

1 Like

@EK77777 custom color palettes and custom font pairs are in the plans. TOC will also be available - actually, it’s the most requested feature.

Performance hasn’t been tested yet, but it should be good because the theme doesn’t contain heavy scripts and styles. We probably need to create a demo site with the Fantasma theme installed so everyone can play with it.

@weemediahq Shirley, thank you for pushing our Fantasma that much :slight_smile:


I think we can cover some of the most requested things for free, so feel free to leave feedback here on the forum or in the app using the dropdown menu in the logo.

Hi PriorityVision, why the FANTASMA.IO website is down? I would like to try it out.

Please recheck it. There was a bug for anonymous users.

Thank you, it’s working now.

It is such a great tool!

Do you have any plan to add more objects like image carousel, and dropdown menu navigation bar?

Carousels and other advanced blocks are on the feature list for the paid version. However, they are not a top priority, so please don’t expect them soon.

Dropdown navigation is available in all our premium themes. Once the paid plan becomes available in Fantasma, dropdowns will be included as well.

1 Like

What a great initiative! I did try it for some bit yesterday and was mightily impressed of what it does. I can clearly see where you got the inspiration from and I do think it’s a very nice flow and UX overall. There are some bits and pieces I’d love to see added though:

  1. Choice of adding additional accent color(s)
  2. Choice of color selection on individual elements, such as buttons and pills
  3. Choice of custom fonts
  4. Choice of adding custom fonts as theme files, to avoid external fonts (GDPR issue here in EU)
  5. Choice of custom color ranges of the primary color, in light and dark modes alike
  6. Possibility to tweak positioning of elements within a block, for example to place the featured image to the right of the title and meta information
  7. Add custom pages as templates for Ghost content creation
  8. Add landing pages where footer and navigation are disabled
  9. Option to keep navigation bar (header) sticky
    1. Always
    2. On scroll up with floating button in the bottom (aligned left, centered or right)
    3. Design options if the navigation bar becomes a long pill or if it’s the entire segment that is floating

Here is a color palette I found that I wanna evaluate using items 2 and 4 in the above list:

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Got some bugs to report :beetle:.

  1. There is no post content shown for posts restricted to members. Only the meta information and feature image. Nothing else.
  2. I added a newsletter form on each page and changed its color to a different than the one setup for the theme. That color choice is not showing when running the exported theme.

Other than that it’s very solid.