Using Ghost as Headless CMS with Eleventy - theme

Developer help
1

Hi All,

I’m a newbie trying to use Ghost as a headless CMS with Eleventy following this post

which in turn suggests me to clone this repo

I have a local Ghost install, from which Eleventy pulls a static website. I have successfully managed to create a post and update it, and both the post and its update are visible using yarn on the static website. So I am sure the “starter” worked.

I am now trying to change theme in the local Ghost install. It seems, however, that the new theme is not updated in the Eleventy-generated static website. If I generate new posts, they are still updated, but using the old theme.

Am I missing something? I thought I could use the local Ghost install also to manage my theme, no?

Thanks

2

No. Apparently “headless” in this context means that eleventy does not use Ghost templating. Ghost is supplying post content and metadata.

Unfortunately the answer is buried in a closed Github issue:
“This Eleventy starter is for when you want to use an external front-end stack outside of Ghost”.

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3

Hey! Sounds like you got things working, but just had a misunderstanding of how themes relate to using static site generators with Ghost. Theme switching in Ghost is for the handlebars theming front-end. When you use a static site generator with Ghost you’re using the Content API to supply posts and pages to the static site generator. There’s a good explanation here of what a headless CMS is: Headless CMS - Top Content Management Systems | Jamstack

4

Thanks, that exactly what I had missed.

5

Yes, I understand now, thanks.

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