Aspire Documentation

Current Version:1.5.8 - 24 September 2020 Changelog →

Edit the theme files mentioned here with your text editor of choice. For example, you can use Visual Studio Code ↗ or Sublime Text ↗.

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

Looking for Ghost hosting? I recommend Ghost(Pro) ↗.

Theme Installation
Upload the routes.yaml File (Required)
Create a New Content API Key (Required)
Members / Subscriptions
- Edit Plan Features
- Remove ‘Log In’ and ‘Subscribe’ from Header
- Membership Troubleshooting Tips
Navigation
- Secondary Navigation
Search
Tags Page
Disqus
- Disable Disqus
Twitter
Advertise Widget
Posts Per Page
Related Posts
Google Analytics
Update Favicon
Social Sharing Icons
Social Media Icons
Theme Translation
- Add a New Language
- Edit a Translation
Theme Deploy with GitHub Actions
Theme Development
- Code Injection
- Zip Theme Files
Theme Update

Theme Installation

The first step is to unzip the downloaded package. Inside the new directory aspire, you will find the zipped theme and a documentation file. Follow these steps to upload the theme to your blog:

Log in to your Ghost website admin (example.com/ghost).
Click Design in the left-side menu.
Scroll down to the INSTALLED THEMES section.
Click Upload a theme.
Select the theme file (aspire.zip).
Once uploaded, click Activate now to activate the theme immediately. If you want to activate it later, click Close.

Upload the routes.yaml File (Required)

The routes.yaml file is required for member sign up and subscription flows.

To upload the file, follow these steps:

Unzip the aspire.zip theme file.
Go to the Labs page in Ghost admin (/#/settings/labs).
Scroll down to the Routes section and click the Upload routes YAML button.
Select and upload the routes.yaml file inside the theme zip file.

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.

Do this separately, after uploading your theme’s zip file.

Create a New Content API Key (Required)

To enable certain features, like 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.

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

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.

Next, click Code injection from the left-side admin menu.

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

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

It should look like this:

Click Save.

Members / Subscriptions

Enable subscribers by checking the Enable members checkbox on the Labs page in your Ghost admin panel.

Once you enabled this feature, different parts of the theme will appear:

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

Edit Plan Features

To edit plan features, edit the partials/signup-plans.hbs file.

To remove Log In and Subscribe from the header, open the partials/header.hbs file and remove lines 28 to 36

Membership Troubleshooting Tips

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

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

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

You can add, edit, delete, and reorder menu links on your Ghost blog in the NAVIGATION section (Admin > Settings > Design).

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

First, type the name of the page as you’d like it to appear on your menu in the 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 you’re satisfied with your page configurations, click the blue Save button to add the page to the navigation menu.

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 theme partials/footer.hbs file and replace line 6 with the following line.

{{ navigation type='secondary' }}

That’s all you need to do.

Search

For the search to work, please make sure to Create a New Content API Key.

Tags Page

Follow these steps to create the Tags page:

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

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 file. 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';

From the theme’s 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, open the post.hbs file and comment or delete the line containing the {{> disqus}} text (line 93).

Twitter

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.

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

Posts Per Page

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

"config": {
  "posts_per_page": 12
}

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

If other posts share the same tags, related posts will be visible at the bottom of a post.

Google Analytics

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

Update Favicon

You can change the favicon in Ghost from Admin > General > PUBLICATION IDENTITY > Publication icon.

–

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

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

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

Ghost supports adding Facebook and Twitter profile URLs from the admin panel. Go to General > Social accounts and add your URLs. This will update Facebook and Twitter URLs within the footer social media section.

For other social accounts, the theme uses Evil Icons to provide very simple and clean icons. 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>

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

Odnoklassniki

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

<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>

<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>

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

Youtube

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

As mentioned above, Ghosts supports adding only Twitter and Facebook links from the admin. But the theme comes with other social icons in the sidebar. Edit or update these in the partials/sidebar-social-icons.hbs file. For example, here’s the Instagram code block:

<li class='c-social-nav__item'>
  <a href='#' aria-label='Instagram' target='_blank' rel='noopener'>
    <span class='c-social-nav__icon' 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 full URL with the link href value. If your Instagram URL is:

https://www.instagram.com/ghost/

Then the new code will be:

<li class='c-social-nav__item'>
  <a href='https://www.instagram.com/ghost/' aria-label='Instagram' target='_blank' rel='noopener'>
    <span class='c-social-nav__icon' data-icon='ei-sc-instagram' data-size='s'></span>
  </a>
</li>

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

This concept is applied to all the custom icon list available in the 3 social media places.

Update Favicon

You can change the favicon in Ghost from Admin > General > PUBLICATION IDENTITY > Publication icon.

Languages

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

Theme Translation

Aspire 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 Admin > General > PUBLICATION INFO > Publication Language and enter the ISO Code.

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

Add a New Language

To add a new language, follow these steps.

Create a new file in the theme’s locales folder with the language ISO Code code. So, if the new language is Arabic, the new file name will be ar.json.
Copy the en.json file content into your new file and start to translate, as shown in the following section.
Go to Admin > General > PUBLICATION INFO > Publication Language and enter the language code (ar in this example).

Edit a 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",
  "Log Out": "Ausloggen",
  "Continue": "Fortsetzen",
  "Subscribe": "Abonnieren",
  "Subscribe Now": "Abonniere jetzt",
  "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 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.",

  "You've successfully subscribed to {siteTitle}": "Sie haben {siteTitle} erfolgreich abonniert.",
  "Great! Next, complete checkout for full access to {siteTitle}": "Toll! Schließen Sie als Nächstes die Prüfung ab, um vollen Zugriff auf {siteTitle} zu erhalten.",
  "Welcome back! You've successfully signed in.": "Willkommen zurück! Sie haben sich erfolgreich angemeldet.",
  "Success! Your account is fully activated, you now have access to all content.": "Erfolg! Ihr Konto ist vollständig aktiviert, Sie haben nun Zugriff auf alle Inhalte.",

  "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",

  "Choose your subscription": "Wählen Sie Ihr Abonnement",
  "Unlock full access to {siteTitle} and see the entire library of members-only content & updates.": "Schalte den vollen Zugriff auf {siteTitle} frei und sieh dir die gesamte Bibliothek mit Inhalten und Updates nur für Mitglieder an.",
  "Subscribe to {siteTitle}": "Abonnieren bei {siteTitle}",

  "Welcome back!": "Willkommen zurück!",
  "Log Into your account again.": "Melden Sie sich erneut in Ihrem Konto an.",
  "Send login link": "Anmeldelink senden",

  "Nice, you're a subscriber!": "Schön, dass Sie Abonnent sind!",
  "You have an active {siteTitle} account with access to all posts.": "Sie haben ein aktives {siteTitle} Konto mit Zugriff auf alle Posts.",
  "You're a subscriber to free members updates": "Sie sind Abonnent der kostenlosen Mitgliederaktualisierungen",
  "You are subscribed to free updates from {siteTitle}, but don't have a paid subscription to read all the posts.": "Sie haben kostenlose Updates von {siteTitle} abonniert, haben jedoch kein kostenpflichtiges Abonnement, um alle Beiträge zu lesen."
}

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.

Theme Deploy with GitHub Actions

Aspire Documentation comes integrated with the Deploy Ghost Theme ↗ Github action.

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

Theme Development

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.

Note

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

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:

assets/js/app.min.js: The final main JavaScript file
partials/compiled/inline-css.hbs: The final CSS file

If you are working with Gulp, it’s recommended you avoid editing these files. Instead, do customizations in assets/sass for CSS or in assets/js/app.js JavaScript. This way you can make sure 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 set up is, and which package versions I use, take a look at the following:

$ node -v
v10.16.0

$ npm -v
6.14.8

$ bower -v
1.8.8

$ gulp -v
CLI version: 2.2.0
Local version: 4.0.2

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

I use macOS.

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 to change the logo color and font size.

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

Zip Theme Files

To create a clean and small theme package, you can exclude different directories using the following CLI command:

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

This will exclude the node_modules and bower_components directories from the final zip file.

If you are running gulp, you can type the gulp zip command to do this.

Theme Update

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

There are two choices:

Keep your current theme and replace only the changed files from the new version. You can find the changed files on the theme page Changelog
Use the new 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 always here to help 😊

Contact Ahmad

Table of Contents

Theme Installation

Upload the routes.yaml File (Required)

Note: upload `routes.yaml` after uploading the theme zip

Create a New Content API Key (Required)

Members / Subscriptions

Edit Plan Features

Remove ‘Log In’ and ‘Subscribe’ from Header

Membership Troubleshooting Tips

Navigation

Secondary Navigation

Search

Tags Page

Note for Self-hosters

Disqus

Disable Disqus

Twitter

Advertise Widget

Posts Per Page

Related Posts

Google Analytics

Update Favicon

Social Sharing Icons

Social Media Icons

Update Favicon

Languages

Theme Translation

Add a New Language

Edit a Translation

Theme Deploy with GitHub Actions

Theme Development

Note

My Current Setup

Code Injection

Zip Theme Files

Theme Update

👋 Support