Ghost has a single, powerful organisational taxonomy, called tags.

It doesn't matter whether you want to call them categories, tags, boxes, or anything else. You can think of Ghost tags a lot like Gmail labels. By tagging posts with one or more keyword, you can organise articles into buckets of related content.

Basic tagging

When you write a post, you can assign tags to help differentiate between categories of content. For example, you might tag some posts with News and other posts with Cycling, which would create two distinct categories of content listed on /tag/news/ and /tag/cycling/, respectively.

If you tag a post with both News and Cycling - then it appears in both sections.

Tag archives are like dedicated home-pages for each category of content that you have. They have their own pages, their own RSS feeds, and can support their own cover images and meta data.

The primary tag

Inside the Ghost editor, you can drag and drop tags into a specific order. The first tag in the list is always given the most importance, and some themes will only display the primary tag (the first tag in the list) by default. So you can add the most important tag which you want to show up in your theme, but also add a bunch of related tags which are less important.

News, Cycling, Bart Stevens, Extreme Sports

In this example, News is the primary tag which will be displayed by the theme, but the post will also still receive all the other tags, and show up in their respective archives.

Private tags

Sometimes you may want to assign a post a specific tag, but you don't necessarily want that tag appearing in the theme or creating an archive page. In Ghost, hashtags are private and can be used for special styling.

For example, if you sometimes publish posts with video content - you might want your theme to adapt and get rid of the sidebar for these posts, to give more space for an embedded video to fill the screen. In this case, you could use private tags to tell your theme what to do.

News, Cycling, #video

Here, the theme would assign the post publicly displayed tags of News, and Cycling - but it would also keep a private record of the post being tagged with #video.

In your theme, you could then look for private tags conditionally and give them special formatting:

{{#post}}
    {{#has tag="#video"}}
        ...markup for a nice big video post layout...
    {{else}}
        ...regular markup for a post...
    {{/has}}
{{/post}}

You can find documentation for theme development techniques like this and many more over on Ghost's extensive theme documentation.

Ghost has a number of different user roles for your team

Authors

The base user level in Ghost is an author. Authors can write posts, edit their own posts, and publish their own posts. Authors are trusted users. If you don't trust users to be allowed to publish their own posts, you shouldn't invite them to Ghost admin.

Editors

Editors are the 2nd user level in Ghost. Editors can do everything that an Author can do, but they can also edit and publish the posts of others - as well as their own. Editors can also invite new authors to the site.

Administrators

The top user level in Ghost is Administrator. Again, administrators can do everything that Authors and Editors can do, but they can also edit all site settings and data, not just content. Additionally, administrators have full access to invite, manage or remove any other user of the site.

The Owner

There is only ever one owner of a Ghost site. The owner is a special user which has all the same permissions as an Administrator, but with two exceptions: The Owner can never be deleted. And in some circumstances the owner will have access to additional special settings if applicable — for example, billing details, if using Ghost(Pro).

It's a good idea to ask all of your users to fill out their user profiles, including bio and social links. These will populate rich structured data for posts and generally create more opportunities for themes to fully populate their design.

There are lots of powerful things you can do with the Ghost editor

If you've gotten pretty comfortable with all the basics of writing in Ghost, then you may enjoy some more advanced tips about the types of things you can do with Markdown!

As with the last post about the editor, you'll want to be actually editing this post as you read it so that you can see all the Markdown code we're using.

Special formatting

As well as bold and italics, you can also use some other special formatting in Markdown when the need arises, for example:

• strike through
• highlight
• *escaped characters*

Writing code blocks

There are two types of code elements which can be inserted in Markdown, the first is inline, and the other is block. Inline code is formatted by wrapping any word or words in back-ticks, like this. Larger snippets of code can be displayed across multiple lines using triple back ticks:

.my-link {
    text-decoration: underline;
}

If you want to get really fancy, you can even add syntax highlighting using Prism.js.

Full bleed images

One neat trick which you can use in Markdown to distinguish between different types of images is to add a #hash value to the end of the source URL, and then target images containing the hash with special styling. For example:

which is styled with...

img[src$="#full"] {
    max-width: 100vw;
}

This creates full-bleed images in the Casper theme, which stretch beyond their usual boundaries right up to the edge of the window. Every theme handles these types of things slightly differently, but it's a great trick to play with if you want to have a variety of image sizes and styles.

Reference lists

The quick brown fox, jumped over the lazy dog.

Another way to insert links in markdown is using reference lists. You might want to use this style of linking to cite reference material in a Wikipedia-style. All of the links are listed at the end of the document, so you can maintain full separation between content and its source or reference.

Creating footnotes

The quick brown fox^[1] jumped over the lazy dog^[2].

Footnotes are a great way to add additional contextual details when appropriate. Ghost will automatically add footnote content to the very end of your post.

Full HTML

Perhaps the best part of Markdown is that you're never limited to just Markdown. You can write HTML directly in the Ghost editor and it will just work as HTML usually does. No limits! Here's a standard YouTube embed code as an example:

Creating a totally custom design for your publication

Ghost comes with a beautiful default theme called Casper, which is designed to be a clean, readable publication layout and can be easily adapted for most purposes. However, Ghost can also be completely themed to suit your needs. Rather than just giving you a few basic settings which act as a poor proxy for code, we just let you write code.

There are a huge range of both free and premium pre-built themes which you can get from the Ghost Theme Marketplace, or you can simply create your own from scratch.

Anyone can write a completely custom Ghost theme, with just some solid knowledge of HTML and CSS

Ghost themes are written with a templating language called handlebars, which has a bunch of dynamic helpers to insert your data into template files. Like {{author.name}}, for example, outputs the name of the current author.

The best way to learn how to write your own Ghost theme is to have a look at the source code for Casper, which is heavily commented and should give you a sense of how everything fits together.

• default.hbs is the main template file, all contexts will load inside this file unless specifically told to use a different template.
• post.hbs is the file used in the context of viewing a post.
• index.hbs is the file used in the context of viewing the home page.
• and so on

We've got full and extensive theme documentation which outlines every template file, context and helper that you can use.

If you want to chat with other people making Ghost themes to get any advice or help, there's also a #themes channel in our public Slack community which we always recommend joining!