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Aspire – Documentation

Theme version: 1.6.0 — 07 June 2022 Changelog

Theme Editing & Tools

Edit the theme files mentioned here with a code editor. I recommend Visual Studio Code, Sublime Text, or Atom. Don’t use TextEdit on Mac.

Once you finish, zip the theme files, and upload the final zip file to your Ghost website.

If editing the routes.yaml file, make sure to upload it after every change you make.

Watch the following short video tutorial about theme editing.

If you are looking for Ghost hosting, I recommend Ghost(Pro).

Table of Contents

Theme Installation

The first step is to unzip the downloaded package by double-clicking it on Mac or by right-clicking and selecting “Extract All” in Windows.

Inside the new folder aspire, you will find the aspire.zip theme file and an online documentation file.

Follow these steps to upload the theme to your website:

  1. Log in to your Ghost website admin (example.com/ghost).
  2. Click the settings icon ( ) at the bottom of the left-hand side.
  3. Go to Design > Change theme.
  4. Click Upload theme and select the aspire.zip theme file.
  5. Once uploaded, click Activate now to activate Aspire.

Upload the routes.yaml File (⚑ Required)

To upload the file, follow these steps:

  1. Unzip the aspire.zip theme file.
  2. In your Ghost admin, click the settings icon ( ) at the bottom of the left-hand side.
  3. Go to the Labs.
  4. Scroll down to the Routes section and click the Upload routes YAML button.
  5. Select and upload the routes.yaml file inside the theme folder.
Upload a routes file in Ghost

Note: upload routes.yaml after uploading the theme zip

There will already be a default routes.yaml file uploaded to Ghost. You need to upload your theme’s routes.yaml to override the default.

Upload the routes.yaml file separately after uploading your theme zip file.

Members / Subscriptions

Aspire has different interface elements for membership feature.

  • Login In and Subscribe links in the sidebar.
  • Footer subscription forms
  • Sidebar subscription form
  • Article subscription form after content

Remove ‘Log in’ and ‘Subscribe’ from Header

To remove Log in and Subscribe from the header, open the partials/header.hbs theme file using a code editor and remove lines 28 to 33. This will also remove the Account and Log out links, visible if logged in.

Once you finish, zip the theme files, and upload the final zip file to your Ghost website.

Remove Ghost Portal / The Bottom Right Button

This is the Ghost Portal button; you can disable it from the Ghost admin. More information at Portal Look and feel.

Remove Ghost Portal

Membership Troubleshooting Tips

If for any reason the subscribe form does not work, or there is an error message, the following tips might help:

  1. First, make sure you run the latest version of Ghost.

  2. If you are self-hosting your website, make sure to set up the mail config. After doing that, restart your Ghost server.

  3. The website config URL should match the URL used to access the website, as described in the Ghost docs.

Enter the URL that is used to access your publication. If using a subpath, enter the full path, https://example.com/blog/. If using SSL, always enter the URL with https://..

If you still have an issue using Ghost Pro, please contact the Ghost team. If you use any self-hosting provider, please contact them for help.

There is nothing to do from the theme side. Also, you can try the original theme demo to double-check that everything is working fine.

For more information about Members, connecting Stripe, and setting the package price, check the official Ghost documentation.

You can add, edit, delete, and reorder the navigation menu in Ghost Admin from the Settings → Navigation page.

Ghost navigation menu

To include a static page on your navigation menu, follow these steps.

First, type the page’s name in the label field as you’d like it to appear on your menu.

Ghost label field

Next, click on the item’s URL. The blog URL will already be auto-populated. Add the page slug after the final /. When satisfied with your page configurations, click the Save button.

Secondary Navigation

Currently, the theme shows the Ghost Primary Navigation in both the header and footer.

To show the Secondary Navigation items in the footer section, open the partials/footer.hbs theme file using a code editor and replace line 6 with the following line.

{{ navigation type='secondary' }}

Once you finish, zip the theme files, and upload the final zip file to your Ghost website.

Like Header Navigation, you can add the footer navigation links from the Ghost admin Settings → Navigation > SECONDARY NAVIGATION.

To enable search, you’ll need to create a new Content API Key. Follow these steps to create your Key.

In the left-side menu of your Ghost admin, click Integrations then + Add custom integration.

Add new Ghost Custom integrations

Give the new integration a name, like “Search”, and click Create.

Name for the Ghost Custom integrations

A new Content API Key will be created. When you hover over it, a Copy button will appear. Click the button to copy the key to the clipboard.

Copy Ghost Custom integrations Content API Key

Next, go to the Ghost admin Code Injection page. Access it from admin Settings > Advanced > Code Injection.

After replacing the CONTENT_API_KEY value with your Content API Key, add the following code to the Site Header box:

<script>
  var search_api_key = 'CONTENT_API_KEY';
</script>

It should look like this:

Inject Ghost Custom integrations Content API Key

Click Save. That’s it. Go and test your search now.

The theme uses ghostHunter.

The search goes through the Post title and the content. It supports only Posts, not Pages.

The supported languages are German, Spanish, French, Portuguese, Italian, Finnish, Dutch, Turkish, and Danish.

If you have a large amount of content on your website, the search might become slow.

The issue is that Ghost does not have a built-in search feature so, to solve this and add search, a third-party library is used. In this case, the ghostHunter library.

This solution works well for most websites, but if the content is too large, it becomes a bit slow as the search happens on the browser side, and all the data will be loaded before the search is happening.

There are currently two solutions:

1. Search only on the post title and ignore the content

This will improve search performance and reduce the loaded content. If this sounds fine, download this app.min.js file and replace it with your theme assets/js/app.min.js.

For reference, what I did was removing the post text from the request API in the assets/js/ghosthunter.js theme file. So line 108 becomes the following.

var url = site_url + "/ghost/api/v4/content/posts/?key=" + search_api_key + "&limit=all&fields=id,title,url,created_at,feature_image";

Instead of.

var url = site_url + "/ghost/api/v4/content/posts/?key=" + search_api_key + "&limit=all&fields=id,title,url,created_at,feature_image&formats=plaintext";

This is done in the theme development mode to generate the final app.min.js file loaded in the theme.

2. Using another search tool

Use another tool like Google Search, Elasticsearch, or Algolia. I have not tried them out, but here are a few resources at Ghost.

Tags Page

Follow these steps to create the Tags page:

  1. From the Ghost admin Pages section, create a new page and give it a title, like “Tags”.
  2. From Page settings, select the Tags template.
  3. Publish the page.
  4. To add the page to the navigation, please check the Navigation section.
Ghost Tags Page

Note for Self-hosters

If you are self-hosting your website, you may need to do a server restart. This should get the Tags option to show up in the Template dropdown.

Disqus

To enable Disqus as a comments system, open the partials/disqus.hbs theme file using a code editor. Replace the aspirethemes-demos value with the disqus_shortname variable to match your Disqus account shortname.

var disqus_shortname = 'aspirethemes-demos';

So, if your Disqus shortname is exampleone, the final code above should be:

var disqus_shortname = 'exampleone';

Once you finish, zip the theme files, and upload the final zip file to your Ghost website.

From the theme side, that’s all you need to set up Disqus. If you have any issues with comments not loading, make sure you have registered your website with Disqus (Step 1).

If you still have issues, check the Disqus troubleshooting guide.

Disable Disqus

To disable Disqus comments, copy and paste the following CSS code into the Ghost admin Code Injection Site Header.

<style>
  #disqus_recommendations, #disqus_thread { display: none; }
</style>

Disable Disqus Recommendations/Ads

Checkout the Disqus Recommendations documentation.

Disable Disqus Recommendations/Ads

Disqus Issues

If you have any issue with Disqus redirecting to any advertising pages, please disable Tracking and Affiliate Links from your Disqus account.

Check out Keegan Leary’s blog post about this issue at https://www.keeganleary.com/disqus-is-evil-trash/.

Also, be aware of Disqus trackings. Check out https://supunkavinda.blog/disqus.

So, you might want to use another commenting system.

Thanks for sharing, Keegan!

Twitter Widget

To set up the Twitter feed:

  • Go to publish.twitter.com.
  • Enter a Twitter URL into the input box and press Enter.
  • Select Embedded Timeline.
  • You will see a Timeline preview and you can customize it as required.
  • Copy the code by clicking the Copy Code button.
  • Open partials/sidebar/widget-twitter.hbs file and replace line 4 with the copied code.
  • Save and you are done.
 

If you want to add an advertisement widget to your sidebar, this widget is the way to go. This will enable you to add an image and a URL associated with it, all you need to do is:

  • Replace your custom image with the image located in the theme directory (assets/images/ads.jpg).
  • Update partials/sidebar/widget-ads.hbs file with the URL (href) value.
  • Add an alternative text to the image (alt value) like the following image.
Advertise Widget Code

If you want to remove the Advertise Widget, you can remove or comment the {{> sidebar/widget-ads}} line inside the partials/sidebar.hbs file.

Sidebar Partials Code

Posts Per Page

You can control how many posts display per page from the package.json file.

"config": {
  "posts_per_page": 12
}

The theme default value is set to 12 posts per page.

Related posts section will be visible at the bottom of a post if other posts share the same tags as the current post.

Google Analytics

To integrate Google Analytics, I recommend using the Google Analytics integration by Ghost.

Update Favicon

You can change the favicon from the Ghost admin Settings > Design > Site design > Brand > Publication icon.

–

Social Sharing Icons

You can customize and update a post’s social media sharing icons from the partials/share.hbs theme file.

Social Media Icons

Social media icons are placed in 3 different places (files):

  • partials/footer.hbs
  • partials/social-nav.hbs
  • partials/sidebar/widget-social.hbs

The Ghost CMS supports adding Facebook and Twitter profile URLs from the admin panel, go to General > Social accounts and add your URLs, this will update the Facebook and Twitter URLs within the location mentioned above.

Ghost CMS Theme Social Accounts

Available Social Media Icons

The theme uses Evil Icons to provide simple and clean icons for other social accounts. Here you can find a list of the social media icons to use:

Facebook

<span data-icon='ei-sc-facebook' data-size='s'></span>

GitHub

<span data-icon='ei-sc-github' data-size='s'></span>

Instagram

<span data-icon='ei-sc-instagram' data-size='s'></span>

LinkedIn

<span data-icon='ei-sc-linkedin' data-size='s'></span>

Odnoklassniki

<span data-icon='ei-sc-odnoklassniki' data-size='s'></span>

Pinterest

<span data-icon='ei-sc-pinterest' data-size='s'></span>

Skype

<span data-icon='ei-sc-skype' data-size='s'></span>

SoundCloud

<span data-icon='ei-sc-soundcloud' data-size='s'></span>

Telegram

<span data-icon='ei-sc-telegram' data-size='s'></span>

Tumblr

<span data-icon='ei-sc-tumblr' data-size='s'></span>

Twitter

<span data-icon='ei-sc-twitter' data-size='s'></span>

Vimeo

<span data-icon='ei-sc-vimeo' data-size='s'></span>

VK

<span data-icon='ei-sc-vk' data-size='s'></span>

Youtube

<span data-icon='ei-sc-youtube' data-size='s'></span>

To edit or update other existed and static social links, let’s take an example from partials/sidebar.hbs file, for example, the Instagram code block:

<li>
  <a href='https://instagram.com/{{! Add Instagram handle }}' target='_blank'>
    <span data-icon='ei-sc-instagram' data-size='s'></span>
  </a>
</li>

The code above contains the ICON code from the above list and the social media link (a) within a list element (li).

Next, replace your Instagram username with {{! Add Instagram handle }} value, so if your Instagram username is ghost, the new code will be:

<li>
  <a href='https://instagram.com/ghost' target='_blank'>
    <span data-icon='ei-sc-instagram' data-size='s'></span>
  </a>
</li>

If you want to remove Instagram altogether, you can delete all the code blocks, the li, a, and the icon.

Update Favicon

You can change the favicon from the Ghost admin Settings > Design > Site design > Brand > Publication icon.

Languages

East ships with many languages already. But if you’d like to add another one, you’ll be able to do that too.

Theme Translation

East supports Ghost i18n and comes with German, Italian, Spanish, French Finnish, Portuguese Dutch, Turkish and Danish translation.

To use a language other than English, go to your Ghost admin Settings > General > PUBLICATION INFO and enter the ISO Code into the Publication Language field.

The following is a list of the available theme languages with the code to use.

  • da for Danish
  • de for Germany
  • du for Dutch
  • en for English
  • es for Spanish
  • fi for Finnish
  • fr for French
  • it for Italian
  • pt for Portuguese
  • tr for Turkish
Ghost Publication Language Setting

Add a New Language Translation

If the theme does not have a translation for your language, follow the following steps to add a new language translation.

  1. Create a new file using a code editor in the theme’s locales folder with the ISO Language Codes code. Foe example, if the new language is Japanese, the ISO code will be jaand the file name will be ja.json.
  2. In the same locales folder, open the en.json file and copy its content into your new language file.
  3. Start translating, as shown in the following Edit Translation section.
  4. Go to your Ghost admin Settings > General > PUBLICATION INFO and enter your language ISO code into the Publication Language field. For example, ja.
  5. Click Save settings.

Once you finish, zip the theme files, and upload the final zip file to your Ghost website.

You may want to restart Ghost or deactivate and activate the theme again to make the new changes effective.

Edit Translation

To improve or edit a translation in a specific available language, you can open the language file in the locales folder:

|____locales
| |____da.json
| |____de.json
| |____du.json
| |____en.json
| |____es.json
| |____fi.json
| |____fr.json
| |____it.json
| |____pt.json
| |____tr.json

For example, the German translation file looks like this:

{
  "Next": "Weiter",
  "Previous": "Zurück",
  " (Page %)": " (Seite %)",
  "Page Not Found": "Seite nicht gefunden",
  "Recent Posts": "kürzliche Artikel",
  "Home Page": "Startseite",
  "Featured Post": "Featured Artikel",
  "Share on Twitter": "Auf Twitter teilen",
  "Share on Facebook": "Auf Facebook teilen",
  "Share on Pinterest": "Auf Pinterest teilen",
  "Search": "Suche",
  "Search {blogtitle}": "Suche {blogtitle}",
  "Type to Search": "Tippe um zu suchen",
  "Published with {ghostLink} & {themeLink}": "Veröffentlicht mit {ghostLink} & {themeLink}",
  "You Might Be Interested In": "Sie könnten daran interessiert sein",
  "Newsletter": "Newsletter",
  "Follow": "Folgen",

  "Email": "E-Mail",
  "Account": "Konto",
  "Log In": "Einloggen",
  "Continue": "Fortsetzen",
  "Subscribe": "Abonnieren",
  "Enter your email below to join our newsletter": "Geben Sie Ihre E-Mail-Adresse unten ein, um unserem Newsletter beizutreten",
  "Please check your inbox and click the link to complete the login.": "Bitte überprüfen Sie Ihren Posteingang und klicken Sie auf den Link, um die Anmeldung abzuschließen.",
  "Please check your inbox and click the link to confirm your subscription.": "Bitte überprüfen Sie Ihren Posteingang und klicken Sie auf den Link, um Ihr Abonnement zu bestätigen.",
  "Please enter a valid email address!": "Bitte geben Sie eine gültige E-Mail-Adresse ein!",
  "An error occurred, please try again later.": "Ein Fehler ist aufgetreten. Bitte versuchen Sie es später erneut.",

  "Already have an account?": "Hast du schon ein Konto?",
  "Don't have an account yet?": "Sie haben noch keinen Account?",

  "This post is for paying subscribers only": "Dieser Beitrag ist nur für zahlende Abonnenten",
  "This post is for subscribers only": "Dieser Beitrag ist nur für Abonnenten",
  "This post is for subscribers on the ": "Dieser Beitrag ist für Abonnenten der ",
  "Upgrade your account": "Aktualisieren Sie Ihr Konto"
}

Each line consists of a left key ("Next") and a right value ("Weiter").

The key is plain English that exists in all translation files and should not be changed. You should change only the value.

If you have any suggestions to improve a current translation or add a new language, please contact me.

Portal Text & Translation

There is no way to change or translate the Portal text yet. The Portal is not part of the theme files but a core Ghost component.

I suggest reaching out to the Gost team ( support@ghost.org ); so they might work on this issue or have a workaround.

Multiple Languages Support

The theme supports Ghost translations for different languages, which means if you set the site language to French, some parts of the theme will change to French, for example, button labels.

On the other hand, having multiple languages on one website is not supported out of the box in Ghost, so the theme. This guide by Ghost explains how to configure multiple languages. I have not tried it, but it might be a good starting point.

Theme Deploy with GitHub Actions

Aspire comes integrated with the Deploy Ghost Theme Github action. The purpose of the GitHub action is to take the theme from the GitHub repo and send it to your website.

Aspire documentation Ghost CMS Theme GitHub Actions

I have written about this in How to Deploy Your Ghost Theme Using Github Actions. All you need to do is follow steps 1 and 2.

The Deploy Ghost Theme action is software by Ghost and works with any Ghost install, whether you self-host Ghost or use Ghost Pro.

Code Injection

Another choice for customization is to use the Ghost Code Injection settings in Ghost admin.

For a CSS example, you can use the following code in the Site Header section to change the logo color and font size.

<style>
  .c-logo__link {
    color: #4550E5;
    font-size: 32px;
  }
</style>

Watch the following short video about Ghost Code Injection, how it works, and how to use it.

Checkout How to use Code Injection Ghost gude for more information.

You can update the footer copyright line information from the theme partials/footer.hbs file. Open and edit that file using a code editor.

AMP

Read more about AMP at Google AMP + Ghost

The theme didn’t have an AMP file; the Ghost default/core one will be in use instead. If you want to customize it, you can add the default Ghost template to the theme folder and customize it.

Theme Development

This section is for developers only, and I assume you know what you are doing.

If you need to add custom CSS code, I highly recommend using Code Injection to avoid redoing your customizations with future theme updates.

Changing any .hbs file, for example, post.hbs, does not require being in development mode with gulp running. Just edit the file in your preferred editor and upload it.

If you are a developer and need to do heavy customization work, the theme uses Gulp to compile Sass and JavaScript. This improves the development flow and makes it much faster.

First, make sure you have Node.js, npm, Gulp CLI, and Bower installed. Check My Current Setup.

Run the following command in the theme root directory to install npm and bower dependencies.

npm install

To start Gulp, run:

gulp

This will compile Sass and JavaScript files and start watching changes as you edit files.

Gulp will produce two files:

➊ assets/js/app.min.js: The final main JavaScript file.

This file is generated from many other JavaScript files listed in the gulpfile.js file. Gulp will do all the work to create that file, so no manual work is needed.

Gulp will watch your changes in the assets/js/app.js or assets/js/ghosthunter.js (if exist) and will then generate the final app.min.js file.

➋ partials/compiled/inline-css.hbs: The final CSS file. It is used as an Internal CSS in the theme partials/head.hbs.

This file is generated from the assets/css/style-min.css file, which was generated by Gulp.

If you are working with Gulp, you should avoid editing these files. Instead, do customizations in assets/sass for CSS or in assets/js/app.js JavaScript. This way, you can ensure the flow is going in the right direction and never lose any changes.

My Current Setup

In case you are wondering what my current environment setup is and which package versions I use, take a look at the following:

$ node -v
v14.17.0

$ npm -v
7.16.0

$ bower -v
1.8.12

$ gulp -v
CLI version: 2.3.0
Local version: 4.0.2

This environment works well for running Ghost and also for theme development.

I use macOS Monterey / M1 Chip.

You don’t have to have the exact environment setup, so that’s fine if your current setup works.

Zip Theme Files

Use one of the following three options to create a zip file ready to upload to your Ghost website.

➊ Using your computer program

You can compress it as a standard folder like any other folder on your computer. If you are on Mac, right-click on the theme folder to view the context menu. Then, click the Compress option.

Ghost theme zip on macOS

➋ Using the command line

zip -r aspire.zip aspire -x '*.git*' '*node_modules*' '*bower_components*'

This command will exclude the node_modules and bower_components in case you are running gulp. And in case you are using Git, it will remove the .git folder.

➌ Using Gulp

Use the gulp zip command if you are running gulp.

Theme Update

You may be wondering how I can update my theme to the latest version?

There are two choices:

  • Keep your current theme and replace only the changed files from the new version. You can find the modified files on the theme page Changelog
  • Use the latest version as a starting point and redo your theme changes and customizations

One way to reduce the need for redoing customizations is to use the Code Injection tool. This is very helpful for adding custom CSS and tracking code. Keeping your custom CSS code with Code Injection is always recommended.

Support

Have any questions? I’m here to help.

Contact Ahmad
Ahmad Ajmi
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