Source

An RTD theme for Ghost, based on the official Ghost/source theme.

First time using a Ghost theme?

Ghost uses a simple templating language called Handlebars for its themes.

This theme has lots of code comments to help explain what's going on just by reading the code. Once you feel comfortable with how everything works, we also have full theme API documentation which explains every possible Handlebars helper and template.

The main files are:

• default.hbs - The parent template file, which includes your global header/footer
• home.hbs - The homepage
• index.hbs - The main template to generate a list of posts
• post.hbs - The template used to render individual posts
• page.hbs - Used for individual pages
• tag.hbs - Used for tag archives, eg. "all posts tagged with news"
• author.hbs - Used for author archives, eg. "all posts written by Jamie"

One neat trick is that you can also create custom one-off templates by adding the slug of a page to a template file. For example:

• page-about.hbs - Custom template for an /about/ page
• tag-news.hbs - Custom template for /tag/news/ archive
• author-ali.hbs - Custom template for /author/ali/ archive

Development

Source styles are compiled using Gulp/PostCSS to polyfill future CSS spec. You'll need Node installed globally. After that, from the theme's root directory:

# install dependencies
npm install

# run development server
npm run dev

Now you can edit /assets/css/ files, which will be compiled to /assets/built/ automatically.

The zip Gulp task packages the theme files into dist/<theme-name>.zip, which you can then upload to your site.

# create .zip file
npm run zip

PostCSS Features Used

• Autoprefixer - Don't worry about writing browser prefixes of any kind, it's all done automatically with support for the latest 2 major versions of every browser.

SVG Icons

Source uses inline SVG icons, included via Handlebars partials. You can find all icons inside /partials/icons. To use an icon just include the name of the relevant file, eg. To include the SVG icon in /partials/icons/rss.hbs - use {{> "icons/rss"}}.

You can add your own SVG icons in the same manner.

Translations

Please see @TryGhost/Themes/theme-translations/README.md for how to build, edit, or contribute translations.

RTD Customisations

There are a couple of "RTD" theme configurations that are opt-in that you turn on in the ghost admin dashboard.

• navigation_layout
• header_style
• footer_style

Most theme customisations are checked using {{#match … "RTD"}} in handlebars and custom CSS is in rtd.css.

Copyright & License

Theme modifications

Copyright (c) 2026 Newcastle University - Released under the MIT license.

Ghost/Source licence

Copyright (c) 2013-2026 Ghost Foundation - Released under the MIT license