I’m using ghost to make a blog. I’ve been scouring the internet for a ghost theme that presents the entire body of each blog post in a reverse-chronological list on the front page of the site. Like blogs like daringfireball.net or https://kottke.org.
This was the way most blogs were designed for many years, and I’m surprised that I can’t find a ghost theme anywhere that does this, let alone several to choose which I like the style most. They all provide a list of posts, with a variation of a “read more” button to take you to a new page with the full post.
Is this somehow a technical limitation of the ghost theme engine? I’m surprised I can’t find a single one, let alone several, that I could decide which I liked best.
Do I need to hire a designer to create a theme like this, or am I missing something?
For “index” pages (pages that are a list of posts), Ghost provides the theme with both an excerpt and the full post. Most themes include the excerpt since that’s what a lot of people want - with the new “theme settings” feature, it’s possible themes might support choosing letting you choose in the future
If you’re willing to modify your theme, it’s a “relatively simple” change - you need to change {{excerpt}} to {{content}} for the templates you want to update.
A) Speaking of truncating…while you can set the number of words to something like: excerpt words=“20” that’s often gonna end in a random part of the sentence which looks kinda janky. Are there any plans (or existing re-usable code) to have it truncate (1) always at the end of a sentence after “20” words (2) and, to optionally add a link that says “Continue reading” kind of like how it’s done on https://om.co
Or, is this something I need to custom author in JS? Seems like many folks would want the text to truncate nicely.
B) Regarding pagination…I see a lot of themes use “Load more” vs page number (like the Coding Horror example.) Is that a simple tweak? Admittedly, haven’t looked into it.
