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Nubia Ghost Theme — Documentation

Theme version: 1.5.5 — 10 October 2023 Changelog

Theme Editing & Tools

Edit the theme files mentioned here with a code editor. I recommend Visual Studio Code or Sublime Text. 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're looking for Ghost hosting, I recommend Ghost(Pro).

Table of Contents


Theme Installation

To begin, unzip the downloaded package by double-clicking it on a Mac or by right-clicking and selecting “Extract All” on Windows.

Inside the new nubia folder, you will find the nubia.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 Site > Design & branding.
  4. Click Customize > Change theme.
  5. Click Upload theme and select the nubia.zip theme file.
  6. Once uploaded, click Activate now to activate Nubia.

Members / Subscriptions

Nubia has different interface elements for membership feature.

  • Login In and Subscribe buttons in the header
  • Footer subscription form
  • If the post is set to Members Only, a Call to Action section on the Post page to encourage visitors to subscribe

Remove Membership Components from the Theme

If you want to disable membership from your website, you can do the following from the website admin. After doing this, all the theme/website membership elements like header links and forms will be removed.

  1. Go to your Ghost admin Settings > Membership > Access > Subscription access
  2. Select Nobody
  3. Click Save

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, ensure 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 you use 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 get in touch with the Ghost team. If you use any self-hosting provider, please get in touch with 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 > Site > Navigation > Primary.

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.

Like Header Navigation, you can add the footer navigation links from the Ghost admin Settings > Site > Navigation > Secondary.


Nubia uses the Ghost Native Search.


Comments

The theme comes with Ghost Native Comments integration. You can turn the comments on from your Ghost admin Settings > Membership > Commenting.

Learn more about Ghost comments.

Ghost developer documentation for comments.

The theme file for Ghost comments partials/comments/ghost.hbs.


Pages

Manage pages for Tags, Authors, and Contact from the Pages section of Ghost admin.

Tags Page

The Tags page will automatically pull all your website tags.

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. Click Publish to 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.

Authors Page

To create the Authors page:

  1. Create a new page and give it a title, like “Authors”.
  2. From Page settings, select the Authors template.
  3. Click Publish to publish the page
  4. To add the page to the navigation, please check the Navigation section above
Ghost Authors Page

Note for Self-hosters

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

Contact Page

To create the Contact page:

  1. Create a new Page and give it a title, like “Contact”.
  2. Add your content and the contact form code using Formspree as a service. Please check the code example below.
  3. Click Publish to publish the page.
  4. To add the page to the navigation, please check the Navigation section.
<form action="https://formspree.io/your@email.com" method="POST">
  <input type="text" name="name" placeholder="Name">
  <input type="email" name="_replyto" placeholder="Email">
  <textarea name='message' placeholder="Message"></textarea>
  <input class='c-btn' type="submit" value="Send">
</form>

For more information, check out How to Add a Contact Form to Your Ghost Blog.


Colors

In this section, you will learn about:

  1. Accent color
  2. Dark mode

Accent Color

Change the Accent color from the admin Settings > Design > Brand > Accent color.

Nubia use Accent color throughout the theme in button background, Ghost Portal button background quotes border, header navigation links hover, and content link color on hover.

Nubia demo Accent color is: b70038

Dark Mode

Go to your website admin Settings > Design > Site design > Site-wide and enable the Enable dark mode option.

Nubia Ghost Theme Dark Mode

Try to change the Accent color to match the dark mode style; set it to white for better color matching results.


If you want to add an advertisement widget to your post sidebar, this widget is the way to go. This will enable you to add an image and a link to the advertized website.

  1. Go to your website admin Settings > Design > Site design > Post
  2. Upload the image from the Advertise widget image option
  3. Add a link to the advertized website from the Advertise widget link option. You can skip this option and the image will be visible without a link

Posts Per Page

You can control how many posts to display per page from the theme package.json file. Open that file using a code editor and change the posts_per_page value from 11 to a number.

"config": {
  "posts_per_page": 11
}

The theme default value is set to 11 posts per page.

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


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


Publication icon

You can change the favicon from the Ghost admin Settings > Design & branding > 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.


Footer social media links are placed in the partials/social-icons.hbs file.

Ghost supports adding Facebook and Twitter profile URLs from the admin panel.

Go to Settings > General > Social accounts and add your URLs. This will update Facebook and Twitter URLs within the footer social media section.

Ghost CMS Theme Social Accounts

Nubia supports adding Instagram, YouTube, LinkedIn, and Pinterest URLs. Go to Settings > Design > Site-wide.

If you want to add new social media links not available in the theme or Ghost settings shown above, you can do that in the partials/sidebar-social-icons.hbs file. You will find the icon’s code that comes with the theme in the Available Social Media Icons section.

For example, to add a new social line for Pinterest, your code will be like:

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

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

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 class='c-social-icons__icon' data-icon='ei-sc-facebook' data-size='s'></span>

GitHub

<span class='c-social-icons__icon' data-icon='ei-sc-github' data-size='s'></span>

Instagram

<span class='c-social-icons__icon' data-icon='ei-sc-instagram' data-size='s'></span>

LinkedIn

<span class='c-social-icons__icon' data-icon='ei-sc-linkedin' data-size='s'></span>

Odnoklassniki

<span class='c-social-icons__icon' data-icon='ei-sc-odnoklassniki' data-size='s'></span>

Pinterest

<span class='c-social-icons__icon' data-icon='ei-sc-pinterest' data-size='s'></span>

Skype

<span class='c-social-icons__icon' data-icon='ei-sc-skype' data-size='s'></span>

SoundCloud

<span class='c-social-icons__icon' data-icon='ei-sc-soundcloud' data-size='s'></span>

Telegram

<span class='c-social-icons__icon' data-icon='ei-sc-telegram' data-size='s'></span>

Tumblr

<span class='c-social-icons__icon' data-icon='ei-sc-tumblr' data-size='s'></span>

Twitter

<span class='c-social-icons__icon' data-icon='ei-sc-twitter' data-size='s'></span>

Vimeo

<span class='c-social-icons__icon' data-icon='ei-sc-vimeo' data-size='s'></span>

VK

<span class='c-social-icons__icon' data-icon='ei-sc-vk' data-size='s'></span>

Youtube

<span class='c-social-icons__icon' data-icon='ei-sc-youtube' data-size='s'></span>

Languages

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

Theme Translation

Nubia 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 using a code editor in the /locales/ theme 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:

{
  "Loading": "Beladung",
  "More Posts": "Mehr Artikel",

  "Recent Posts": "kürzliche Artikel",
  "Featured Post": "Featured Artikel",
  "Page Not Found": "Seite nicht gefunden",
  "Comments": "Bemerkungen",
  "You Might Be Interested In": "Sie könnten daran interessiert sein",
  "Authors": "Autoren",
  "Navigation": "Navigation",
  "Newsletter": "Newsletter",
  "Advertise": "Werben",
  "Tags": "Stichworte",
  "1 min read": "1 minuten gelesen",
  "% min read": "% minuten gelesen",
  "Published with {ghostLink} & {themeLink}": "Veröffentlicht mit {ghostLink} & {themeLink}",

  "Share on Twitter": "Auf Twitter teilen",
  "Share on Facebook": "Auf Facebook teilen",
  "Share on LinkedIn": "Auf LinkedIn teilen",
  "Share on Pinterest": "Auf Pinterest teilen",
  "Share via Email": "Teilen Sie per E-Mail",
  "Copy link": "Link kopieren",
  "Link copied to clipboard": "Link in die Zwischenablage kopiert",

  "Search": "Suche",
  "Search {siteTitle}": "Suche {siteTitle}",
  "Type to Search": "Tippe um zu suchen",

  "Account": "Konto",
  "Log In": "Einloggen",
  "Subscribe": "Abonnieren",
  "Your email": "Deine E-Mail-Adresse",
  "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",

  "Join the newsletter to receive the latest updates in your inbox.": "Treten Sie dem Newsletter bei, um die neuesten Updates in Ihrem Posteingang zu erhalten"
}

Each line consists of a left key ("More Posts") and a right value ("Mehr Artikel").

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 or other parts of the website like Comments and Search labels. It is also not possible to translate the newsletter emails your subscribers receive. These are core Ghost components and not part of the theme layer; we can’t control them.

I suggest reaching out to the Ghost 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 is.


Syntax Highlighting

You can add a fenced code block by placing triple backticks ``` before and after the code block. For example:

```
pre {
  background-color: #f4f4f4;
  max-width: 100%;
  overflow: auto;
}
```

Will produce the following gray look:

Nubia Ghost Theme Syntax Highlighting

To highlight a code block, add the language alias like css or js to the code block. For example, the CSS code in the previous example will wrap between ```css and ``` as follows:

```css
pre {
  background-color: #f4f4f4;
  max-width: 100%;
  overflow: auto;
}
```

This will produce the following colored look:

Nubia Ghost Theme Syntax Highlighting with prismjs

To add inline code, wrap the text between two backticks ` `.

Prism

The theme ships with Prism.js, a lightweight, robust, and elegant syntax highlighter.

The initial Prism package includes some languages, like Markup, CSS, C-like, and JavaScript.

You can add support for more languages by adding the Prism autoloader script, which will automatically load the languages you need. T do this, add the following script to the website admin Code Injection (Site Footer).

<script src="https://cdnjs.cloudflare.com/ajax/libs/prism/1.28.0/plugins/autoloader/prism-autoloader.min.js" integrity="sha512-fTl/qcO1VgvKtOMApX2PdZzkziyr2stM65GYPLGuYMnuMm1z2JLJG6XVU7C/mR+E7xBUqCivykuhlzfqxXBXbg==" crossorigin="anonymous" referrerpolicy="no-referrer"></script>

Click Save.


Post Feature Image Size

An image width of (800px × 445px) would fit the homepage cards and the post header.

You can also use an image with a double size (1600px × 890px) for a high-resolution image preview.


Theme Deploy with GitHub Actions

Nubia 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.

Nubia ghost theme — 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.

Check out How to use Code Injection Ghost guide for more information.


Dropcaps

To enable the dropcap style, go to your website admin Settings > Design > Site design > Site-wide and enable the Enable dropcap option.


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


Zip Theme Files

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

Have any questions? Contact Ahmad

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