My Ghost Headline theme fork with dark mode

This blog is powered by the free, open source Ghost blogging software.

Why I like the Headline theme

For my personal site I wanted a dark mode theme that would work well for writing about a range of unrelated topics. I also go for months without writing anything at all, so I wanted a front page that could feature more "durable" content instead of whatever happened to be the most recent.

Changes I made to the Headline theme

The Headline theme was designed with local newspapers in mind, but with a few tweaks it also works well for personal sites. Here are the changes I've made so far. This list may get out of date over time!

• Since there’s only one author, author photos and bylines have been hidden.
• “Reading time” was hidden
• Allows admin to support Light, Dark or Auto in Settings
• Auto mode sets the color scheme based on user preference
• Titles on tag pages are “Title Case” instead of UPPERCASE.
• “Latest” items on home page has been replaced with “Featured” items.
• Less whitespace in the footer
• Smaller “header” area
• Narrower top bar
• Custom archive page to list every post.

For details on how to turn a Ghost theme into dark mode see this:

How to turn a Ghost theme to dark mode

There are a lot of things I like about the Edge theme, but the black and grey on white color scheme didn’t work. Hack the theme or code injection?

Spectral Web ServicesCathy Sarisky, Ghost Expert

Using my dark mode Headline theme

I have a the Github repo linked below for my fork, with more docs and instructions in the README there. This is a personal fork with no promises of how it will evolve over time. I recommend using it as inspiration for your own fork instead of using it directly!

Note: my changes are on the "markstos" branch, not the the "main" branch!

GitHub - markstos/Headline-markstos at markstos

A theme for Ghost highlighting multiple tags on the homepage - GitHub - markstos/Headline-markstos at markstos

GitHubmarkstos

How I maintain my Ghost theme fork

I use Git to maintain my fork. When I want to merge in new changes that have been made from the official theme, I use git rebase to replay my changes on top of the latest official theme and resolve any conflicts.

The last time I did this, there were conflicts in assets/built – assets that automatically created during a built step. To resolve that conflict, I deleted everything in the assets/built directory and then ran npx gulp build to re-build all the assets from my fork, I could then git add the changed files and proceed with the git rebase When there was a complaint about gulp missing, I used yarn add --dev gulp to add it.

Automatically deploying theme changes

Currently, I manually upload a new theme "zip" file after making changes. But it's possible have a Ghost blog be automatically updated as soon as theme changes are pushed to Github. This post has the details of setting up the automation:

How to Deploy Ghost Themes Using GitHub Actions

Making changes to the themes on a Ghost blog is a tedious process. This can be simplified with GitHub Actions.

Linux HandbookAvimanyu Bandyopadhyay