Static content - Ghost Pro or Ghost+Gatsby+Netlify

Developer help
1

Dear Ghost Forum,

At first I want to say that is incredible refreshing and charming to get back to such an active, helpful and friendly community. I am personally coming from a Wordpress history including the necessity of many plugins for SEO, page builder etc.

Since I want to move to a sleek, fast and great new tool I stumbled across Ghost and felt in love immediately. I know HTML and CSS but am quite a while out of the game.

Now I am thinking if Ghost Pro is my way to go incl. some static landing pages via dynamic routing OR Ghost Pro + Gatsby + Netlfiy or Gatsby Cloud. I am not a HUGE tech expert so the charme of Ghost Pro is very high :slight_smile:

What I want to achieve:

  • Website for an own affiliate review website

  • Landing pages with static content that will be adjusted once a month or so

  • Nested articles for review, tutorials etc.

  • Tutorials will then be sold via membership plugin from Ghost Pro (in the best case)

My biggest challenge right now is how to build the static pages and their more or less individual design incl. better, more complex menus.

What is your recommendation, should I invest time to understand the Gatsby + Ghost Pro connection or go with Ghost Pro and use normal HTML pages for the static content :slight_smile:

Thanks a lot for your help - a very happy soon Ghost user :wink:

Warm regards

Sebastian

2

Hey @Sebastian_Tischer :wave:

My suggestion is to start with just Ghost, and if you feel that there are limitations in using the Ghost frontend, switch to Gatsby + Ghost. One thing to note is that headless Ghost doesn’t have official support for the membership feature.

You can create custom pages using Ghost, and with Github Actions, you can use git to make changes to these pages on the fly.

3

Great, thank you a lot for the fast reply :slight_smile:

Headless CMS is the Gatsby Integration right?

One question:
Since I am no developer, how tough is it to just take a html template and try to „convert“ some landing pages into the static pages in Ghost Pro? Can this be achieved quite easily?

Besides that, the content for these special landing pages, would then be maintained in the actual theme files not in the ghost backend right?

Thanks again and warm regards
Sebastian

4

You are correct, Gatsby uses headless Ghost.

Creating custom pages in Ghost is pretty easy - just create a page with the slug (e.g. /super-duper-page) and then in your theme, create a file called page-super-duper-page.hbs with the contents. You can either use the default layout

{{!< default}}

<p>This is some super awesome content</p>

or use your own. Don’t forget to include {{ghost_head}} and {{ghost_foot}} for SEO + code injection, though!

You are correct, content will be maintained in the Ghost theme files, rather than the Ghost backend. Note: You also have the option of using custom page templates and creating a mostly empty template (e.g. just the boilerplate ghost stuff) where you can put whatever you want using the Ghost editor.

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5

You are great, thank you a lot for the fast help :slight_smile:

Two final questions:
1.) Is this a total bad way to “missuse” Ghost or something not too uncommon?
2.) Is there an option to define sections in the posts and pages that later are referenced and maintained in the backend? Something like:

  • Pricing title 1, 2, 3
  • Pricing description 1, 2, 3

Otherwise I would create it barely static via HTML and in Github and then push it to Ghost :slight_smile:

For the static pages, I would try to buy a nice HTML theme and then merge/transform it into a Ghost theme - hope this is as easy as I think it is… :smiley:

Warm regards and thanks again!

Sebastian

6

I think most of the time’s I’ve seen “misuse” in Ghost is people trying to forge it into something it isn’t.

I’m not sure I fully understand your second question; are you trying to paginate (e.g.) the pricing page?

7

So my usecase wouldn’t be to much of forcing Ghost to something it isn’t? :) It will be a few static pages with a really nice informative design as overview.

The second question:

  • For the static page, I like to have overview symbols for the categories (tags) below as the four symbols here:
    https://rediverge.com/

Now the question is, where to maintain the content. Can I only do this via the code or is it possible to define sections in code and then reference these sections within the Ghost backend?

8

Everything you’re doing is definitely within the scope of Ghost!

Ghost doesn’t allow for sections to be pulled in from the theme right now. The closest thing to that is custom custom templates but that’s for the entire page design rather than individual elements.

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