Substation: a newsletter-first theme (Substack on Ghost)

Marketplace
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Hi all!

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I’ve been working on a newsletter-first theme for the last few weeks. I just launched it today.

It’s called Substation.

The idea is to flip the usual “blog” style theme and put the newsletter front and centre. The homepage features the subscription form and posts are shown in the Archive.

Substation supports free and paid memberships so you can very easily create a member-only or premium newsletter, and you can quickly add comments with Cove. If you’ve ever thought about self-hosting a Substack-like newsletter (without the 10% fees), now you can on Ghost!

This theme wouldn’t have been possible without the recent advances in Ghost’s features, so a massive thanks to the team for all their work! :100:

You can view the Substation demo at substation.rdnthemes.com
Documentation is at substation.rdnthemes.com/docs/

Substation is $29 but you can pay what you want above $19 for the next few weeks :sparkles:

If you need any help installing or updating Ghost, check out gloat.dev!

I’d love to hear what you think or if you have any feedback

Cheers!
-Dan

7 Likes
2

Hi Dan,

I’m strategizing a new paid newsletter and am considering options. This looks like a great starting point. I have a few questions:

  1. How does the workflow go? Is it something like, I create a post and then click Send or something and the post goes out with any formatting to my email list and also to the archive on the site?

  2. I’m already setup with another newsletter on Campaign Monitor. It looks like Ghost integrates with Campaign Monitor so I’m thinking that would work here too. Is that right?

  3. Are there any examples yet of this theme in the wild?

Thanks!

-Lon

3

Hi Lon,

  1. When you go to Publish a post, you will have a new option to also send the post over email to your members. It’s a post-by-post setting, so you don’t have to send every post over email if you don’t want to. All published posts will be shown on the site.
    The post has a default design which is defined by Ghost; it’s an email-friendly design that looks great, though it obviously won’t match your site design 100%. If you DM me your email address, I can forward you an example email.

  2. If you want to send over Campaign Monitor, you would have to somehow reproduce the content there and send out to your subscribers from CM. There is a way to send out posts from CM based off your RSS feed, but I’m not sure how that works or how the final emails look.

  3. I don’t know of any working examples yet other than the demo. I haven’t followed up on any sales to check final sites.

Hope this helps!

-Dan

5

I bought this theme, but when I click Read past issues
I’m getting…

404
Page not found
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Hey! You just need to upload the routes.yaml file from the theme folder into the Labs page. Full instructions here: Loading...

7

Thanks, missed that part. Works now

1 Like
8

Great!

9

Hey, I’ve been trying to make Discourse (what I use for comments) work with Substation for a while to no avail (I use my own install of Discourse not the hosted one). Any advice? Couldn’t find any reference online so thought to ask. Thanks

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Have you seen Ghost’s Integration page for Discourse?