Petra Ghost Theme — Documentation

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 petra folder, you will find the petra.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 petra.zip theme file.
6. Once uploaded, click Activate now to activate Petra.

Upload the routes.yaml File (⚑ Required)

To upload the file, follow these steps:

1. Unzip the petra.zip file — the one you uploaded to your website — on your computer.
2. In your Ghost admin, click the settings icon ( ) at the bottom of the left-hand side.
3. Go to Advanced > Labs.
4. Click Open > Beta features.
5. From the Routes section, click Upload routes YAML button.
6. Select and upload the routes.yaml file inside the theme folder.

Homepage

The homepage will show a list of content sections.

• Homepage Content
• Homepage Highlight Boxes
• Homepage Featured and Recent Posts

Homepage Content

➀ In Ghost admin, create a new Page.

➁ In Page settings, set the Page URL as home.

➂ Add your content, Excerpt, upload your feature image.

Above the title in the Ghost editor, click the + Add feature image to upload your image.

➃ Click Publish.

Now, go to your website homepage, and your content is visible.

Homepage Highlight Boxes

Think of the Highlight Boxes section as a wall where you can add links to your important pages, whether on your website or other websites. For example, you can add a link to your online course, shop, podcast, or book. You got the point.

The Highlight Boxes section is invisible by default. To show it:

1. Go to your Ghost admin Settings > Design & branding > Homepage
2. Activate the Show highlights section option

Update the Highlight Boxes

Unzip the petra.zip file — the one you uploaded to your website — on your computer.

Open the petra folder using a code editor and open the theme /partials/home/highlights.hbs file. You can find four default boxes.

Each Highlight box contains:

1. Highlight link
2. Highlight icon
3. Highlight title
4. Highlight description

<a href='#' class='c-card-highlight'>
  <div class='c-card-highlight__head'>
    <span class='c-card-highlight__icon'>❖</span>
    <h3 class='c-card-highlight__title'>Consulting</h3>
  </div>
  <p class='c-card-highlight__description'>Would love working together? Let’s do that.</p>
</a>

Let’s update the above example with new data. I will make a box to link to my Goodreads profile, so I will:

1. Replace the link href # value in the first line with my page URL
2. Add a custom icon — see the icon example below or you can also use an emoji
3. Instead of Consulting, let’s use Books
4. And replace the description

The previous example might look like this:

<a href='https://www.goodreads.com/user/show/5387651-ahmad' class='c-card-highlight'>
  <div class='c-card-highlight__head'>
    <span class='c-card-highlight__icon'>❖</span>
    <h3 class='c-card-highlight__title'>Reading</h3>
  </div>
  <p class='c-card-highlight__description'>Checkout my Goodreads profile and reading list.</p>
</a>

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

Dingbat ❊

✁ ✂ ✃ ✄ ✅ ✆ ✇ ✈ ✉ ☛ ☞ ✌ ✍ ✎ ✏ ✐ ✑ ✒ ✓ ✔ ✕ ✖ ✗ ✘ ✙ ✚ ✛ ✜ ✝ ✞ ✟ ✠ ✡ ✢ ✣ ✤ ✥ ✦ ✧ ★ ✩ ✪ ✫ ✬ ✭ ✮ ✯ ✰ ✱ ✲ ✳ ✴ ✵ ✶ ✷ ✸ ✹ ✺ ✻ ✼ ✽ ✾ ✿ ❀ ❁ ❂ ❃ ❄ ❅ ❆ ❇ ❈ ❉ ❊ ❋ ● ❍ ■ ❏ ☺ ☻ ♥ ♦ ♣ ♠ • ◘ ○ ❐ ❑ ❒ ▲ ▼ ◆ ❖ ◗ ❘ ❙ ❚ ❛ ❜ ❝ ❞ → ☀ ↳ ⤷ ✌︎ ☼ 

➀ ➁ ➂ ➃ ➄ ➅ ➆ ➇ ➈ ➉

➊ ➋ ➌ ➍ ➎ ➏ ➐ ➑ ➒ ➓

Fleuron ❦

❦ ❧ ☙

Homepage Featured and Recent Posts

To control how many Featured or Recent posts to show, go to your Ghost admin Settings > Design & branding > Homepage

You will find two input settings:

• Number of featured posts default value is 2, which will only show two featured posts.
• Number of recent posts default value is 6, showing only the recent six posts excluding featured posts.

Input values you can use:

1. Number, 1, 2 or 3 or any number you want to include
2. all to show all posts
3. none to show nothing

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.

Changing Colors

You can change all your website colors from the admin settings.

Go to your website admin Settings > Design > Site design > Site-wide to show color settings.

Colors Explained

1. Text color primary. Main text color for site content
2. Text color secondary. Text color for post date and image caption elements
3. Border color. Color of the border, for example, the border around post cards
4. Background color primary. The main background color
5. Background color secondary. For site footer, post card hover background, Highlight boxes hover background, and a placeholder for images before loading.

You can also set the Accent color from the admin Settings > Design > Brand > Accent color. The Accent color is used for the content Header Card with the background set to the Accent color and also for the Homepage Highlight Boxes.

Color Tools

The following are some online websites and tools to help with color inspiration. Please make sure you choose an accessible color scheme; this is important for readers.

• https://www.fffuel.co/cccolor/
• https://coolors.co/
• https://mdigi.tools/color-shades/
• http://web-accessibility.carnegiemuseums.org/design/color/
• http://colorsafe.co/
• https://clrs.cc/a11y/
• https://accessible-colors.com/

Membership

Petra has different interface elements for membership features.

1. Homepage top subscribe form in the introduction section
2. Global subscribe form at the end of every page
3. Call to action section on the post page to encourage visitors to subscribe if the post is for members only

If the visitor is already logged in, all the forms will be hidden automatically.

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 homepage top subscribe form

Add the following CSS code into the Ghost admin Code Injection Site Header.

<style>
  .c-content--home .c-subscribe { display: none; }
</style>

Click Save.

Remove the global subscribe form

Add the following CSS code into the Ghost admin Code Injection Site Header.

<style>
  .c-section--newsletter { display: none; }
</style>

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.

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

Post Feature Image Size

The post feature image ideal size to upload is 1054 × 702. The visible size is 527 × 351, but double it to 1054 × 702 to look sharper on retina displays.

Navigation

You can add, edit, delete, and reorder navigation menu in Ghost Admin from the Settings > Site > Navigation > Primary.

Add New Page to Navigation

First, type the page name as you’d like it appear on your navigation 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 /.

Click the Save button.

Add Blog Page to Navigation

To add the blog item to the site navigation, add it as a navigation item. Make sure to set the destination URL to /blog/ like the following screenshot.

Dropdown

Add a Hyphen (-) followed by a space before the navigation Label to add a dropdown menu.

In this example, Contact will be the parent item with Blog and Archive as child items.

Secondary Navigation / Footer

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

Search

Petra uses the Ghost Native Search.

To remove search:

1. Go to your Ghost admin Settings > Design > Site design > Site-wide
2. Toggle the Show search option off
3. Click Save

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.

Footer Social Media Links

Ghost supports adding only Facebook and Twitter URLs. Go to Settings > General > Social accounts and add your URLs from your site admin.

By default, Ghost fills these fields with the Ghost social links. If you don’t have Twitter and Facebook, you can remove the default ones, and the links will disappear from the theme.

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

The social links theme file is at /partials/social-links.hbs.

Languages

Petra comes in many languages already. But if you’d like to add another one, you’ll be able to do that too.

Theme Translation

Petra supports Ghost i18n and comes with Arabic, German, Italian, Spanish, French, Finnish, Portuguese, Dutch, Turkish, and Danish translations.

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.

• ar for Arabic
• da for Danish
• de for Germany
• en for English
• es for Spanish
• fi for Finnish
• fr for French
• it for Italian
• nl for Dutch
• pt for Portuguese
• tr for Turkish

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 ja and 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.

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

Now, go to your Ghost admin Settings > General > PUBLICATION INFO and enter your language ISO code into the Publication Language field. For example, ja.

Click Save settings.

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
| |____ar.json
| |____da.json
| |____de.json
| |____en.json
| |____es.json
| |____fi.json
| |____fr.json
| |____it.json
| |____nl.json
| |____pt.json
| |____tr.json

For example, the German translation file (de) looks like this:

{
  "Skip to content": "Zum Inhalt springen",

  "Page Not Found": "Page Not Found",

  "Featured Posts": "Featured Posts",
  "Recent Posts": "Recent Posts",
  "Next": "Next",

  "Comments": "Kommentare",

  "1 min": "1 minuten",
  "% min": "% minuten",

  "Loading": "Wird geladen",
  "Load More": "Weitere Artikel",

  "Subscribe": "Abonnieren",
  "Email address": "Email address",
  "Subscribe to receive the latest posts in your inbox.": "Abonnieren Sie, um die neuesten Beiträge in Ihrem Posteingang zu erhalten.",
  "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.",

  "This content is for Members": "Dieser Inhalt ist für Mitglieder",
  "This content is for Paid Members": "Dieser Inhalt ist für bezahlte Mitglieder",
  "This content is for Subscribers on the ": "This content is for Subscribers on the ",
  "Upgrade your account": "Aktualisieren Sie Ihr Konto",
  "Already have an account?": "Hast du schon ein Konto?",

  "Published with {ghostLink} & {themeLink}": "Veröffentlicht mit {ghostLink} & {themeLink}"
}

Each line consists of a left key ("Loading") and a right value ("Wird geladen").

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.

RTL

RTL means right to left. Turning on RTL makes the theme readable for languages written from right to left, like Arabic or Hebrew.

To enable the RTL option, open the partials/head.hbs theme file using a code editor and change line 7 to {{> css/dist/style-rtl }}.

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

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

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 15 to a number.

"config": {
  "posts_per_page": 15
}

The theme default value is set to 15 posts per page.

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

Typography Drop Caps

The theme comes with different styles of typography drop caps. It will apply to the first letter of the first word in a given paragraph.

To add a drop cap style to a paragraph.

1. Add an HTML card to your Post or Page content editor
2. In that HTML card, add a <p> </p> HTML element with the Drop Cap CSS class. For example, <p class='u-drop-cap-small'> </p>. Check below for the available classes for each style
3. Add your paragraph text whith that <p> </p> HTML element

There are currently two styles available.

➊ Small Drop Cap

• CSS class → u-drop-cap-small
• Example ↓

<p class='u-drop-cap-small'>TEXT HERE</p>

The result.

➋ Large Drop Cap

• CSS class → u-drop-cap-large
• Example ↓

<p class='u-drop-cap-large'>TEXT HERE</p>

The result.

Changing Theme Typeface

Petra is using one typeface, DM Sans.

The theme loads DM Sans using Google Fonts in the theme partials/typography.hbs file. It is then assigned as a CSS Variable and other system fonts as a backup as the following example.

:root {
  --font-family: 'DM Sans', -apple-system, BlinkMacSystemFont, 'Segoe UI', Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif;
}

To change the typeface to any from Google Fonts, use Code Injection Site Header.

For example, if you want to use the Roboto typeface from Google Fonts. Your code in Code Injection might be like this.

<link href='https://fonts.googleapis.com/css2?family=Roboto:wght@300;400;700&display=swap' rel='stylesheet'>

<style>
  :root {
    --font-family: 'Roboto', -apple-system, BlinkMacSystemFont, 'Segoe UI', Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif;
  }
</style>

If you have a custom typeface, check out the Loading Custom Typeface section below.

You might find the following posts helpful as well:

• How to Change a Ghost Theme Font Using Google Fonts
• Change Ghost Casper Theme Fonts with Google Fonts

Loading Custom Typeface

I assume you have the font files and the initial @font-face CSS code for loading the font. Something similar to the following code.

@font-face {
  font-family: 'Atyp';
  src: local('Atyp Text Regular'), local('Atyp-Text-Regular'),
    url('AtypText-Regular.woff2') format('woff2'),
    url('AtypText-Regular.woff') format('woff'),
    url('AtypText-Regular.ttf') format('truetype');
  font-weight: 400;
  font-style: normal;
}

➊ Create a new folder in the theme under /assets and name it fonts, for example, then copy your font files there.

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

➌ In Ghost admin Code Injection, add your @font-face code with the new font files path wrapped in the <style> element.

<style>
  @font-face {
    font-family: 'Atyp';
    src: local('/assets/fonts/Atyp Text Regular'), local('Atyp-Text-Regular'),
        url('/assets/fonts/AtypText-Regular.woff2') format('woff2'),
        url('/assets/fonts/AtypText-Regular.woff') format('woff'),
        url('/assets/fonts/AtypText-Regular.ttf') format('truetype');
    font-weight: 400;
    font-style: normal;
  }
</style>

This should load the fonts. Then you can use the font and do your styling for the body and so on.

RSS Feed URL

RSS is a way for people to receive updates from your website by adding your website’s RSS link to their RSS application (Feedly for example). Once you publish content, they will receive a notification.

Publication icon

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

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;
}
```

This will produce the following gray look:

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:

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.

Footnotes

Ghost has limited support for footnotes, which means it doesn’t support footnotes outside of the editor Markdown card. So, if your article content is in Markdown, this will work fine for you.

For creating a footnote, check out the Markdown Guide – Footnotes for more information about the syntax. You can check out how the theme renders this example in the demo. So, in your editor, you need to add a new Markdown card and your footnote inside.

The theme will render what the editor can do; the theme has no built-in footnotes support but Ghost. Check out this theme demo example.

Check out this Forum discussion for more information and probably some ideas and workarounds.

I have not done any work to support footnotes beyond the basic Ghost Markdown implementation, so I’m afraid I can’t give any advice here.

Theme Deploy with GitHub Actions

Petra 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.

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.

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.

Customize Logo Size

If you are using an image as a logo (instead of the site name) and want to change the logo size, use the following code in Code Injection.

<style>
  .c-logo__img { max-height: 40px; }
</style>

The default value is 40px, so you can increase this value to match your preference.

Footer Copyright

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

If you just want to remove the Published with Ghost… part, copy and paste the following code into the Ghost admin Code Injection Site Footer.

<script>
  var footer_copy = document.querySelector('.c-footer-copy'),
  footer_copy_visible_part = footer_copy.innerText.split('-')[0];
  footer_copy.innerText = footer_copy_visible_part;
</script>

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.