🧠 Build with Ghost: Do you know these essential concepts?
Issue 6 features three things you must know when building a Ghost theme, how we're on our way to supporting 33 different languages, 25 examples of jaw-dropping typography, and an interview with the cool site, Architecture Notes
Welcome to Issue #6! Some highlights from this issue by the numbers:
- Our new tutorial lays out 3 essential concepts to know when building a Ghost theme
- Ghost is on its way to supporting 33 different languages
- 25 examples of jaw-dropping typography
- Get to know the systems powering our daily lives from the 1 and only Architecture Notes
Pro tip: Hopefully, you're already using snippets, Ghost's feature that allows you to reuse content across posts and pages. But did you know you can also turn an entire post or email into a snippet? For example, if you send out a weekly newsletter that always follows the same format, you can create a snippet from the entirety of an existing email to jump-start a new issue. (Additionally, use our new duplicate post feature to achieve this functionality. A bonus here is that tags and authors are retained across copies.)
Essential concepts to know when building a Ghost theme
Our newest tutorial covers three essential concepts to know when building a Ghost theme. Here are the concepts:
- What a templating language is and the basics of Ghost's templating language, Handlebars
- The three required files —
index.hbs,post.hbs, andpackage.json— that contribute to a theme's structure - How contexts connect your site's data with the right template
These concepts will give you the foundational knowledge you need to build a killer custom theme 💪
Tutorials
Just shipped 🚢
- We added a video to our tutorial on installing Ghost locally. Also, have you subscribed to our channel on YouTube?
- Efforts are underway to provide translatable components throughout Ghost. We already have support for 33 languages 🌍 See which languages are supported and learn more
Ideas and tools 🛠️
- Create beautiful code screenshots to share on social media or your Ghost site with CodeImage
- Color on the web is undergoing a massive update right now. Leverage the new wide-gamut colors to make out-of-this-world gradients
- A handy list of 50 free resources for designers, including images, illustrations, icons, fonts, and tools
- Typography can make or break your site — which is especially true for the prose-heavy content common with Ghost publications. Check out these 25 examples of dope typography for a little inspiration
- Some things are best learned by seeing them in action. This CodePen provides an interactive playground to explore how CSS backdrop filters work, so you can make sweet blurs and other effects
Featured site: Architecture Notes
On the beautiful site, Architecture Notes, Mahdi Yusuf publishes content about the systems we use every day. As a Senior Staff Engineer at 1Password, former CTO at Gyroscope, and technical researcher, Mahdi is no stranger to system design and software architecture. Recent posts discuss technical debt and database sharding, and there's even a capture-the-flag event that challenges participants to solve a series of encryption-related puzzles.
Architecture Notes
If you were looking for somewhere to start with Mahdi's content, he recommends two posts in particular: Redis Explained — which offers an awesome introduction to the open-source key-value database server — and Relational Databases Explained, which includes this awesome infographic:
Of all the possible systems and platforms out there, we asked Mahdi why he uses Ghost. He says that he's followed Ghost since day one (10 years ago), and when version five dropped, it became his choice for a publication and newsletter service all in one. Also, he says, "The community is incredible and the built in subscription system is a no brainer as my platform of choice."
When working with Ghost, he advises keeping the setup simple, posting consistently, and leveraging snippets (see the tip above) for reusable elements. We agree with all of this and recommend heading over to Architecture Notes to finally learn what database sharding is — turns out it's more than just a funny word 😜
Many sites featured in the Build with Ghost newsletter are discovered through our creator network, Ghost Explore. It’s a way for creators and readers alike to discover their favorite new publications. Anyone running a Ghost site can add themselves to Explore to be featured throughout the wider Ghost ecosystem. If you’d like to be featured in this newsletter, add your site to Explore and reply to this email.
Thanks for building with us.
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