I’ve just released Wire, my third Ghost theme. It is built for publications with more than one writer — the kind where posts group into issues, and the newsletter deserves an archive of its own.
This looks so good! I really love the main menu and how cleanly each dropdown opens. I also like that you have dedicated pages for membership, newsletter, and accounts - it makes everything super easy for users/members to navigate. The bookmark feature is a nice touch too. It makes it really easy for readers to save posts and come back to them later. I feel every Ghost theme should have these by default but they don’t.
One thing I noticed is that some of the footer nav links either aren’t assigned correctly or aren’t working, so I’d definitely check those. I also noticed the homepage flickers quite a bit, and scrolling sometimes isn’t super smooth.
Overall though, it’s a really clean and good-looking theme. Great job!
Thank you — this is exactly the kind of feedback I was hoping for.
You are right about the footer. The links are pointing at the correct pages, but each one is showing the label of the next item, so the whole list reads one step off. My mistake in the nav partial. Fix is on the way.
The flicker and the scrolling are real too, and worse than they look: I have will-change set on over a thousand elements from a rule that is far too broad, plus three stacked backdrop-filters in a sticky element. Both are fighting the compositor rather than helping it. That is going into the same
release.
Glad the bookmarks and the membership pages landed — those took the longest.
I will post here when the update ships.
Wow, that is a quick response. Glad to know you are fixing those.
yes I like that you have those dedicated pages as they are very helpful. tbh I don’t understand why most theme creators do not do these as they will only help both visitors and members. This also shows creativity and how beautiful ghosts theme can be.
I should also mention that I like how you have added RSS in the newsletter page itself. And having the advertising slots are cool too. Is it possible to add the advert slots on any posts and newsletters?
1.0.1 is out. The footer is fixed — every link was showing the next item’s label. I also pulled a will-change rule that was promoting over a thousand elements to their own layers, plus the stacked backdrop-filters in the sticky overlay. That was the flicker and the rough scrolling.
Your question sent me back into the ad code, and it turned out the AdSense slots could never have filled: the units were missing their ad unit IDs and were never initialised. Fixed in the same release, so thank you for asking.
There are two separate things. What you saw on the demo are the sidebar widgets — Sponsors, fed by posts tagged #sponsor, and House ad, fed by a page with the slug house-ad. Homepage only.
Then there is the AdSense pair, off by default: a banner above the header and an in-article slot on posts. Each now takes its own ad unit ID. Since newsletter issues are ordinary posts, that slot covers the web version of every issue too.
The emailed newsletter is a no, and that is a Ghost limit rather than mine — emails are built from Ghost’s own template, not the theme.
Slots on the newsletter archive and tag pages are a fair ask, on the list.
Looks very sharp! One issue I noticed on my end however was the animations when I moved over on the dropdowns and links seemed to be a bit jerky and not smooth at all. I’d be tempted to transfer our site (RileySentinel.com) to something like this was more smooth and equally responsive on mobile. I do like the option for saving bookmarks for the readers, that is nifty.
