Tutorial

How To Change Themes and Adjust Settings in Ghost

Published on October 16, 2013
How To Change Themes and Adjust Settings in Ghost

Introduction


Ghost is a great new blogging platform that focuses on content creation and presentation over the superfluous bells and whistles that dominate other platforms. It provides a clean, easy-to-use interface and can produce very polished results.

In the first part of this article, we discussed how to manage content in Ghost by creating, editing, and deleting blog posts.

The second part of this article will cover some simple configuration that will help get your site off the ground.

How To Change Ghost Themes


The main aesthetic adjustment that you can make to your blog is the theme. A theme controls how all of the pieces are presented visually and how the elements are drawn together.

There are a number of different themes you can get for Ghost. Some are free and some you must purchase.

We will apply one of the free themes from the Ghost Marketplace called “N’Coded”.

You can see this theme by visiting:

marketplace.ghost.org

Click on the “N’Coded” theme to be taken to the theme’s GitHub page.

Log into your Ghost VPS and navigate to the Ghost themes directory:

cd /var/www/ghost/content/themes/

We will use git to install the theme into this directory. Install git if it is not already present in the system:

apt-get update && apt-get install git-core -y

Now, we can clone the project from the GitHub page:

git clone https://github.com/polygonix/N-Coded.git

Change ownership of the files to the Ghost user and group:

chown -R ghost:ghost N-Coded

Restart Ghost to allow it to see the new theme folder:

service ghost restart

Open your web browser and navigate to the general settings page:

<pre> <span class=“highlight”>your_domain_name</span>/ghost/settings/general </pre>

Scroll down to the bottom and you will see a “Theme” area. Change the theme to “N-Coded”:

Ghost change theme

Click the “Save” button in the upper right corner.

Navigate to your blog to see the new theme:

Ghost theme example

How To Change Ghost Settings


You can change most of your blog’s settings by navigating to the “settings” page of your blog:

<pre> <span class=“highlight”>your_domain_name</span>/ghost/settings </pre>

You will be taken to the general settings page:

Ghost general settings

Here, you can adjust items like the title and description of your blog, and update the logo and cover images.

To change details for your user, click on the “User” tab on the left-hand side:

Ghost user settings

Here, you can adjust settings for your profile. These details include your user name and email, as well as a short biography and a link to a personal external site.

If you scroll to the bottom of the page, you can change your personal password by typing in your current password and supplying/confirming a replacement:

Ghost change password

Conclusion


Ghost helps you stay focused on your content by removing the distractions present in other blogging platforms. You should now be able to start generating content and adjust themes and the most common settings.

Explore the interface and practice using the system to manage your ideas. Publish some posts and create some drafts without publishing to see how Ghost organizes those pieces. The more you play around, the more comfortable you will be using the platform on a daily basis.

<div class=“author”>By Justin Ellingwood</div>

Thanks for learning with the DigitalOcean Community. Check out our offerings for compute, storage, networking, and managed databases.

Learn more about us


About the authors

Still looking for an answer?

Ask a questionSearch for more help

Was this helpful?
 
10 Comments


This textbox defaults to using Markdown to format your answer.

You can type !ref in this text area to quickly search our full set of tutorials, documentation & marketplace offerings and insert the link!

@Kamal Nasser: Hi, I’m facing the same problem as @hamchapman’s.

I created a droplet with the application “Ghost 0.5 on Ubuntu 14.04”, it runs well. Then I modified the config.js, but restarted ghost failed. The response is:

ghost: unrecognized service

Would you please give me some help?

The “service ghost restart” command gives me the error “ghost: unrecognised service”.

Any ideas what I can do to fix that?

Thanks for the great article though!

I misconfigured my ghost blog, because i hade no access to my domain hoster, so i changed the owner and when i send out invites it points to a non-excisting domain, there is another config beside the main one ? thanks

If you get a 502 error, make sure that your theme’s folder has the appropriate case. “Mochi” might work when “mochi” doesn’t, for example.

Tried applying the ghostion theme (https://github.com/axiantheme/ghostion) and followed these instructions but when I apply the theme I get error 500 failed to lookup view “index”

Great guide easy and just works out of the box

how do i change the theme if it’s not on gitHub?

I am also getting 502 errors after changing templates… related to the template maybe?

whoops, I mean

service ghost-firstsite restart service ghost-secondsite restart

Try DigitalOcean for free

Click below to sign up and get $200 of credit to try our products over 60 days!

Sign up

Join the Tech Talk
Success! Thank you! Please check your email for further details.

Please complete your information!

Get our biweekly newsletter

Sign up for Infrastructure as a Newsletter.

Hollie's Hub for Good

Working on improving health and education, reducing inequality, and spurring economic growth? We'd like to help.

Become a contributor

Get paid to write technical tutorials and select a tech-focused charity to receive a matching donation.

Welcome to the developer cloud

DigitalOcean makes it simple to launch in the cloud and scale up as you grow — whether you're running one virtual machine or ten thousand.

Learn more
DigitalOcean Cloud Control Panel