Learning to develop ghost themes

Developer help
1
  • How was Ghost installed and configured?
  • What Node version, database, OS & browser are you using?
  • What errors or information do you see in the console?
  • What steps could someone else take to reproduce the issue you’re having?

None of these are really applicable to this question. Perhaps I am in the wrong area for this post.

I am trying to learn how to modify my ghost theme. My background might be pertinant. I am not in any type of webdev field. I have however in the past developed websites and can hack my way through python, html and css. I recently brushed up on html and css. lots of new stuff.

After diving into this ghost theme and reading through the documents, it really makes sense. At least a lot of it does. I feel like I am grasping how it’s supposed to work but the development environment is completely new. Is there some kind of material available that I can go through so I can set up and do this right. I am interested and motivated. I have a lot on my plate, but I am shoving some stuff off to make room.

I see a real need for some theme developers for ghost. The market ghost was perfectly designed for is growing rapidly. I have used wordpress, its a bloated mess and takes a lot of configuring to get one working properly for a website that actually depends on that site functioning.

I guess I basically need to know what I need to know, if that makes sense. I saw some conflicting information, or maybe different approaches, for instance yarn vs npm.

If someone could maybe give a quick list of what they think is the best way to go about this that would be great.

Thanks
joe

1 Like
2

Building a Ghost theme is actually pretty fun–once you get going!

I would start with Ghost’s official theme starter:

You can clone this repo/use this template to get everything you need to start up a Ghost theme development environment.

# Install your dependencies
npm install

# Bundle your files and watch for changes
npm run dev

# Zip the theme for upload
npm run zip

I included the npm commands here, but you can also use Yarn. npm is a little simpler because it comes installed with Node.

I also created my own Ghost theme starter, which works a little differently than the official one.

I have a post about using it if you’re interested:

Good luck on creating a Ghost theme!

2 Likes
3

Thanks! Nice post on your blog. I am gonna start tinkering around this and working through a few online tutorials on a few specific things. You blog post itself lays out some things nicely.

Thanks again for pointers!

1 Like