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Ghost CMS Cheatsheet

A quick reference guide to Ghost CMS, covering its core concepts, features, and common tasks.

Core Concepts

Key Terminology

Posts

The primary content type in Ghost, representing articles or blog entries.

Pages

Static content like ‘About’ or ‘Contact’ pages.

Tags

Used to categorize and organize posts.

Authors

Users who create and publish content.

Members

Users who can subscribe to your content.

Themes

Control the visual appearance of your site.

Admin Interface

Access the Ghost admin panel by navigating to /ghost on your domain (e.g., yourdomain.com/ghost).

This is where you create, edit, and manage your content, users, and settings.

The admin interface is divided into sections for Posts, Pages, Members, Settings, and Explore.

Content Editor (Koenig)

Ghost uses a block-based editor called Koenig for creating posts and pages.

Each piece of content is a ‘card’, allowing for flexible layout and content types.

Common card types include Markdown, HTML, image, embed, and callout.

Theme Development

Theme Structure

Ghost themes are built using Handlebars.js for templating.

Key files include:

  • default.hbs: The base template for all pages.
  • index.hbs: Template for the homepage/post listings.
  • post.hbs: Template for individual posts.
  • page.hbs: Template for individual pages.
  • tag.hbs: Template for tag archives.
  • author.hbs: Template for author archives.
  • partials/: Directory for reusable template snippets.

Handlebars Helpers

{{@site}}

Access site-wide data (e.g., name, description, logo).

{{@post}}

Access post-specific data (e.g., title, content, url).

{{@page}}

Access page-specific data.

{{url}}

Output the URL of a post, page, tag, or author.

{{content}}

Output the post or page content.

{{excerpt}}

Output the post excerpt.

Theme Settings

Ghost themes can be configured using package.json to define settings that can be customized in the Ghost admin panel.

This allows users to easily change things like accent colors, social media links, and other theme-specific options without directly editing the theme files.

API & Integrations

Content API

Ghost provides a Content API for fetching posts, pages, tags, and authors.

This allows you to use Ghost as a headless CMS and build custom frontends using any technology.

Access requires an API key, which you can generate in the Ghost admin panel.

Example request using the Content API:

GET /ghost/api/content/posts/?key=[your_api_key]

Admin API

The Admin API allows you to manage content, users, and settings programmatically.

It requires authentication using JWT (JSON Web Tokens).

Use cases include building custom integrations and automating content management tasks.

Webhooks

Ghost supports webhooks, allowing you to trigger actions in other applications when certain events occur (e.g., post published, member created).

This enables seamless integration with other services and workflows.

Command Line Interface (Ghost-CLI)

Installation

Install Ghost-CLI globally using npm:

npm install ghost-cli -g

Common Commands

ghost install

Install a new Ghost instance.

ghost update

Update an existing Ghost instance to the latest version.

ghost start

Start the Ghost process.

ghost stop

Stop the Ghost process.

ghost restart

Restart the Ghost process.

ghost config

Configure Ghost settings.

Configuration

Ghost-CLI helps you configure your Ghost installation, including setting up the database, mail server, and SSL certificate.

Run ghost config to interactively set these options.
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