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Nubia Documentation - Ghost

Current Version: 1.4.3 - 02 July 2020 Changelogs →

Theme Installation

The first step is to unzip the downloaded package and you will find the actual theme inside besides a documentation file. Then do the following steps to upload the theme to your blog.

  • Log in to the admin section of your Ghost blog yourblog.com/ghost.
  • Select Design from the left-hand side of your admin area and go to the INSTALLED THEMES section.
  • Click on the Upload a theme green button.
  • An upload box will open, then choose the theme file (nubia.zip).
  • Once uploaded. Click on Activate now button to activate the theme immediately or Close if you want to activate it later.

Create a new Content API Key

In order for the Search to work, we need to generate a new Content API Key using the following steps.

From Ghost admin, click Integrations from the sidebar menu, then click + add custom integration.

Add new Ghost Custom integrations

Then, give the new integration a name, for example, Search and click Create.

Name for the Ghost Custom integrations

Now, a new Key is created, hover over it and the new Copy button will appear, click on it to copy the Key to the clipboard.

Copy Ghost Custom integrations Content API Key

Next, click Code injection from the sidebar menu and add the following code to the Blog Header box after replacing the XXXX value with your API KEY.

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

To be like:

Inject Ghost Custom integrations Content API Key

Click Save.

Members / Subscription

Subscribers can be enabled via a checkbox on the Labs page (Labs > MEMBERS (BETA)), in your Ghost admin panel:

enable subscribers

Once enabled, different parts of the theme will appear:

  • Login In and Sign Up buttons in the header.
  • Footer subscription form.
  • Call to action section in Post page to encourage visitors to subscribe if the post is set to Members only.

In order for the blog to fully supports member sign up flows and subscriptions, within the theme folder is a routes.yaml file. Upload this single file using Routes on the Labs page.

Upload a routes file in Ghost

Edit Plans Features

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

Subscription plans in Nubia

Remove “Log In” And “Sign Up” From Nav Bar

To remove the “Log In” and “Sign up” from the navigation menu. Open the partials/header.hbs file and remove lines from 28 to 36.

For more information about Members, connecting Stripe and setting the package price, I highly recommend checking the official Ghost documentation.

Dark Mode

Sinai Ghost Theme Dark Mode

To enable the dark mode version, open the default.hbs file and change line 10 to be {{> compiled/inline-css-dark }} instead of {{> compiled/inline-css }} as:

Sinai Ghost Theme Activate Dark Mode

Save the file and upload the theme to your Ghost blog.

You can add, edit, delete and reorder menu links on your Ghost blog from the Navigation section in the admin area located at ghost/#/settings/design.

navigation menu

To include a static page on your navigation menu. First, type the name of the page as you’d like it to appear on your menu in the label field.

label field

Next, click on the URL field of the menu item and we can find that the blog URL is already auto-populate for us. We will need to add the page slug after the final /. Once satisfied with our page configurations. Clicking the blue Save button will add the page to the navigation menu.

For the search to work, please make sure that the Public API enabled.

The theme uses ghostHunter. Search is done for the post title and the content.

The supported languages in addition to English are Russian, French, Spanish, Germany, Portuguese, Italian, Finnish, Dutch and Danish.

Tags Page

To create the Tags page:

  • From the Ghost admin Pages section, create a new page and call it Tags for example.
  • From Page settings, select the Tags template from the Template dropdown.
  • Publish the page.
  • To add the page to the navigation, please check the Navigation section above.

Ghost Tags Page

Authors Page

To create the Authors page:

  • Create a new page and call it Authors for example.
  • From Page settings, select the Authors template from the Template dropdown.
  • Publish the page.
  • To add the page to the navigation, please check the Navigation section above.

Ghost Authors Page

Contact Page

To create the Contact page:

  • Create a new Page and call it Contact for example.
  • Add your content and the contact form code using FORMSPREE as a service. Please check the code example below.
  • Publish the page.
  • To add the page to the navigation, please check the Navigation section above.
<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 c-btn--small c-btn--active' type="submit" value="Send">
</form>

For more information, check the How to Add a Contact Form to Your Ghost Blog blog post.

Disqus Comments

Nubia Theme comes with Disqus comments enabled.

Open partials/disqus.hbs file. Change the aspirethemes-demos value for 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';

That’s all you need to setup Disqus from the theme side. If you get any issue that comments are unable to load. First, make sure you have registered your website with Disqus (Step 1)

And also check Disqus troubleshooting guide if you still have issues.

Disable Disqus

If you want to disable Disqus comments. Open the post.hbs file and comment or delete the line contains the {{> disqus}} text (line 32).

Autoload Disqus

If you want to autoload Disqus without clicking the Comments button, open the partials/disqus.hbs file and replace the file content with the following code.

<div id='disqus_thread'></div>
<script>
  var disqus_shortname = 'aspirethemes-demos'; // required: replace `aspirethemes-demos` with your Disqus shortname

  // DON'T EDIT BELOW THIS LINE
  var disqus_config = function () {
    this.page.url ='{{url absolute="true"}}'
    this.page.identifier = 'ghost-{{comment_id}}';
  };

  var d = document, s = d.createElement('script');

  s.src = 'https://' + disqus_shortname + '.disqus.com/embed.js';

  s.setAttribute('data-timestamp', +new Date());
  (d.head || d.body).appendChild(s);
</script>
<noscript>Please enable JavaScript to view the <a href='https://disqus.com/?ref_noscript' rel='nofollow'>comments powered by Disqus.</a></noscript>

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/advertise-image.jpg).
  • Update partials/sidebar/widget-advertise.hbs file with the URL (href) value.
  • Add an alternative text to the image (alt value) like the following image.

Advertise Widget Code

Remove Advertise Widget

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

Sidebar Partials Code

Posts Per Page

With Ghost 1.0, the Posts per page setting is now part of the theme. The config purpose is to control how many posts to show per page from the package.json file like this:

"config": {
  "posts_per_page": 11
}

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

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 wrapp between ```css and ``` as following:

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

Will produce the following colored look:

Nubia Ghost Theme Syntax Highlighting with prismjs

To add an inline code, you can wrap the text between two backticks ` `, for example:

This inline code example `absolute="true"`

Will produce the following look:

Maxima Ghost Theme Syntax Highlighting with prismjs

Nubia shipped with Prism.js, a lightweight, robust, and elegant syntax highlighter.

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

You can add and support more languages. For example, to add support for PHP:

Get the PHP component script from Prism CDN.

<script src="https://cdnjs.cloudflare.com/ajax/libs/prism/1.13.0/components/prism-php.js"></script>

Add the script to Ghost Code Injection Site Footer section. Click Save button.

Nubia Ghost Theme Syntax Highlighting Code Injection PHP Prism

Related posts will be visible on the single post in case there are similar posts sharing the same tags.

Enabling the Public API required.

Google Analytics

To integrate Google Analytics. I would recommend reading Google Analytics integration steps by Ghost.

Responsive Tables

Responsive tables required and essential for adding tabular content and allows tables to be scrolled horizontally. You can make any table responsive across all viewports by wrapping a table with .responsive-table, for example:

<div class='responsive-table'>
  <table>
    ...
  </table>
</div>

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

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.

social-accounts

For using other social accounts, the theme is using Evil Icons to provide a 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>

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, for example, the Instagram code block:

<li class='c-social-icons__item'>
  <a href='#' aria-label='Instagram' target='_blank' rel='noopener'>
    <span class='c-social-icons__icon' data-icon='ei-sc-instagram' data-size='s'></span>
  </a>
</li>

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

Next, replace your Instagram full URL with the link href value so if your Instagram URL is:

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

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>

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

Update Favicon

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

Update favicon

Theme Translation

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

To use another available language than English, go to Admin > General > PUBLICATION INFO> Publication Language and enter the Language Code Reference.

  • de for Germany
  • it for Italian
  • es for Spanish
  • fr for French
  • fi for Finnish
  • pt for Portuguese
  • du for Dutch
  • da for Danish

Ghost Publication Language Setting

Add New Language

To add a new language, you can follow the steps in the Official Ghost Documentation.

Edit Translation

To improve or edit a translation in a specific available language. You can open the language file under locales folder:

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

For example the Germany translation file will look like:

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

  "Recent Posts": "kürzliche Artikel",
  "Featured Post": "Featured Artikel",
  "Page Not Found": "Seite nicht gefunden",
  "Load Comments": "Bemerkungen",
  "You might also like": "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}": "Veröffentlicht mit {ghostLink}",

  "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",

  "Log In": "Einloggen",
  "Sign Up": "Anmelden",
  "Continue": "Fortsetzen",
  "Subscribe": "Abonnieren",
  "Subscribe Now": "Abonniere jetzt",
  "Your email ": "Deine E-Mail-Adresse",
  "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",

  "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",

  "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.",
  "Sign Up to {siteTitle}": "Anmelden 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 consist of a left key ("More Posts") and right value ("Mehr Artikel"). The key is a plain Englich which exist in all translation files and should not be changed. You can only change the value.

If you have suggestions to improve the current translations or added a new language. Please let me know. Instead, you can contribute to the online translations.

Theme Deploy with GitHub Actions

Nubia comes integrated with the amazing Deploy Ghost Theme Github action.

Nubia GitHub Actions

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

Theme Development

If you are a developer and need to do heavy customization work. The theme is using Gulp to compile Sass and JavaScript. This improves the development flow and making it much faster.

First, make sure you have Node.js, npm, Gulp CLI, and Bower installed. 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.

You can also watch the following screencast. I setup the theme to installing the packages and run an experiment with Sass to change the brand color.

Gulp will generate two files:

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

It’s recommended to avoid editing these files if you are working with Gulp. Instead, do customizations in assets/sass files for CSS or in assets/js/app.js for JavaScript. So, we can make sure the flow is going in the right direction and we never lost any changes.

Code Injection

Another option 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 as:

<style>
  .c-logo__link { color: #4550e5; }
</style>

To create a clean and small theme package. You can exclude different directories using the following command line:

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

This will exclude 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.

Change Font

You can use custom CSS code to change the font of any element. The following is an example of how to use the Encode Sans font from Google Fonts to change the body and the logo font.

Using Code Injection Site Header section, embed the font code from Google Fonts and then assign the font to the body and the logo.

<link href="https://fonts.googleapis.com/css?family=Encode+Sans:300&display=swap" rel="stylesheet">

<style>
  body { font-family: 'Encode Sans', sans-serif; }
  .c-logo__link { font-family: 'Encode Sans', sans-serif; }
</style>

Code Inection Site Header section code to Change a Font in Ghost Theme

If you are using a font from another service, you can embed it as shown in the font documentation.

Theme Update

You may be asking: How can I update my theme to the latest theme version from ThemeForest?

There are two options to update your theme:

  • Keep your current theme and only replace the changed files from the new version. You can find the changed files on the theme page Changelog.

  • Or, use the new version as a starting point and redo your theme changes and customizations.

One thing to reduce the need for redoing customization is to use the Code Injection tool. This is very helpful for adding custom CSS and tracking code for example. So, it’s always recommended to keep your custom CSS code with Code Injection.

I know that this might not be so practical and I feel you. There should be a better solution. I hope Ghost design a better workflow, something like child themes found in WordPress. You may reach the Ghost team and get their attention to this.

👋 Support

Have any questions? I'm always here to help 😊

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Ahmad Ajmi