Hansika Documentation

Using the theme

To use the theme, at first extract the main downloaded zip file.

After extracting you will find a folder named similar to theme name. That folder is the production ready ( live site ready ) theme. After the required setup you will make a zip of this folder's content ( all files and folders within this folder ) and upload it to your ghost site.

To set up the theme properly with several setting options, please read through the documentation.

Please edit theme files using a proper code editor. There are lots of free and open source code editor available. You can choose any of those, some popular free code editor Visual Studio Code , Atom

Light and dark mode

This theme comes with light and dark mode. User can select dark or light mode as per their preference. This option let your user choose whether they prefer dark color or light color. User preference will be saved in their browser locally. Whenever they visit your site in future, they will see their preferred mode.

In site design settings options, there is an option to select to select default theme mode. There are three options for theme default mode.

System - detect user's system preference and set the mode accordingly.
Light - Set light theme mode.
Dark - Set dark theme mode.

You can choose one of these three options.

Logo settings

This section describe instruction to setup image logo. If you do not use image logo then site title will be shown at the place of logo and you can skip this section.

As this theme has option to toggle dark and light mode. You have to provide, 2 different logo for 2 different mode.

I recommend to make your logos in svg format, but the format is not absolute requirement.

At first prepare 2 version of your logo ( each for dark background and light background ).
Go to ghost dashboard and then Settings > design.
Under brand section you will see the Publication logo option.
Upload the logo which is made for light background ( i.e. dark color logo for light background).
Now close the brand section and open Site-wide section. There is an option named Logo for dark mode.
Upload the second logo ( light logo for dark background ) there.

Body background color for light mode

This theme comes with an option using which you can set a background color for the lite theme mode. The name of this option is Light body background color which you can find under Site-wide section.

The color #FDF6EC is set by default. You can change this to any color you want. General recommendation is very light color with a tint of your choice.

If you don't want to set any tint to the background and want pure white color use pure white color code #FFFFFF.

Title and body font

By default this theme uses Libre Baskerville font for the titles and Inter font for the body text.

You can chang this within the settings options. There are 11 fonts included in this theme setting. Use any font combination or same font for title and body. The name of the options are Title font and Body font.

Enable rounded corner

By default the theme dose not show any rounded corner for any element.

But there is an option Rounded corner under Site-wide setting section. If you enable all elements will show rounded corners.

In this theme the 3 mode of stickiness of navigation are as follows.

Sticky hide: Navigation will hide on scroll as normal mode but as revers scroll start the navigation will be shown fixed on top of the page.
Sticky: Navigation will stick always on top of the page.
Normal: No sticky navigation.

By default the navigation is set to Sticky hide mode. You can change this in the site design setting. This option is under Site-wide section.

Choose Sticky-hide or Sticky or normal at the Navigation bar type setting option.

Copyright text

Normally you do not have to change the copyright text. But if you wan to change or edit the copyright text then follow the following steps.

Go to design setting option in your ghost dashboard.
Under Site-wide section you will see an option named Copyright text override.
Add any text there to override the default copyright text.

Intro section on home page

This theme comes with four different custom intro layout.

You can hide this section entirely or add or change the heading and description text from the dashboard under settings option.

Go to site design setting options and expand the homepage settings options section.

To hide the intro section entirely Turn off the Show home intro option.
Choose any one of four intro section style in Home hero style option.
Add any text in Home intro title option. It will be shown in as the title.
By default the Site description from brand section shown as the description in the intro section. You can override that by adding different text in the Home intro description override option text box.

In both title and description you can use basic HTML tags for bold, italic, links etc. See tags example below.

<strong>Your text</strong> - Make text bold.
<em>Your text</em> - Make text italic.
<a href="#">Your text</a> - Link your text. Replace # with your link URL.

In the intro section there is an email subscription form. If you don't want this then you can disable this option Show email subscription form.

Featured posts on home page

On home page of this theme it shows five recent featured posts. So make your posts as featured and it will be shown there.

If there is no featured post available in your site, this section will not be displayed.

If you want to change the maximum number of post in this section, do the following.

Open featured-posts.hbs file which is located in partials folder.
At the first line you will see the following code.

{{#get "posts" limit="5" include="tags,authors" filter="featured:true"}}

Change limit="5" in that line to the number of your choice.

There are two navigation in Ghost. Primary and secondary. In this theme the primary navigation is shown in header and the secondary navigation is shown in footer.

By default In header (primary) navigation first 4 item will be shown directly and if there is more than 4 item in your primary navigation then those will be shown under a more dropdown item. It is handled by the theme. You have to do nothing for this.

But if you want to change the number of direct visible item in your primary navigation then you can do that by changing it in theme file.

Open navigation.hbs file which is located in partials folder.
At line number 7 you will see following code.

{{#foreach navigation to="4"}}

Change the number 4 to any number of your choice.

Also change from="5" to the next number you choose for direct visible navigation at line number 13.

In Footer (secondary) navigation there are 3 columns. First column shows first 5 item, second column shows next 5 items and last column shows rest of the items.

Each column shows a small heading above the navigation items. If you need to change those heading you can change those in the theme file. You can change in language file en.json which is located in locales folder.

Find the following entries in that file.

"Features": "Features",
"Pages": "Pages",
"About": "About",

Change The right side words to the words you want to show. For example

"Features": "About Brand",

If you don't want to change the texts in language (en.json) file but want to change directly in theme's code. Then please follow the steps below.

Open navigation.hbs file located in the partials folder.
At line number 68 you will see the following code

<div class="title">{{t "Features"}}</div>

Change the Word Features to your word, what you want to show there. Change words same way how you did above step at line number 85 and 102 for other two column.

If you want to change number of items in each column you can do this by changing limit and form value at line numbers 64, 81 and 98.

At the footer of this theme Social links are being shown. To add your social links please follow the steps below.

From your ghost dashboard, Go to setting > general page. In social account option, you can add Facebook and Twitter link there. This Facebook and Twitter will be linked with the icons.

There is no option to add other social links directly from dashboard. Following are the steps to add other links.

open social-links.hbs file located in partials folder.
From line number 12, you can add different social links. Replace the # for each href value with your own profile links.
If you want to add other social links or want to remove one then copy or remove one of those lines. You can see all available icons in partials > icons folder.

The code in social-links.hbs file, where you will add your links, will look like below.

<a href="#" aria-label="instagram link">{{> icons/instagram}}</a>
<a href="#" aria-label="github link">{{> icons/github}}</a>

Comments

This theme supports native Ghost comments. But also support Disqus comment.

You can choose which comment you want to show, at option Select comment under Post setting section.

If you choose Disqus comment then you have to add the Disqus shortname in the next option.

To get and set the Disqus shortname please follow the steps below.

Go to disqus.com and sign up.
After log in go to admin dashboard.
Then follow the instruction and add your website there.
At the time of adding your site you will get a disqus shortname, copy that.
Now put that shortname in the Disqus shortname option text box.

Code highlighting

Code highlighting is already implemented within this theme. This feature is not used by all user of the theme. It only used by technical writer who writes code example within their article.

This feature loads extra javascript code which is a waste of resources for those people who do not use this feature. That is why by default it is disable in this theme. Required css is already there. You just have to add a single line in code injection to load the javascript file.

Go to Settings > Code injection page in your dashboard and add the following line in the Site footer box( bottom box).

<script src="/assets/js/plugin/prism.js"></script>

Author and tag archive

In this theme there are two custom template for Tag archive and Author Archive. These pages shows list of all tags and all archive respectively. To use those template please follow the steps below.

Create a new page.
Add a Title ( example: Authors or Authors Archive or any thing else you want).
Open page settings panel by clicking on icon at top right corner of the page.
Scroll down in the settings panel and select Author Archive Page template for this page.
Publish the page and add the page link in your navigation.
Save it and visit your site. If you did everything right then you will see your newly created link in your menu bar. Open to see all available author list.

For Tag archive page follow the same steps as author archive setting. At step 4 choose "Tag Archive Page"template option. Then Follow all the remaining steps and you will be able to add a tag archive page in you site.

Yearly and monthly post archive

With this theme you can show an archive page which shows all the posts. There are 2 option for this page. You can setup which you want. The available options are as follows.

Yearly archive.
Monthly archive.

If you want to show yearly or monthly archive page which shows all post at once then follow the steps below.

At first upload the custom routes.yaml.

Find the custom routes.yaml file which comes with this them.
Go to Settings > Labs in your dashboard.
At the end of the page you will find Routes option. Download your current routs.yaml file for backup and then upload the custom routes.yaml file which comes with the theme.

Now create the page.

Create a new page.
Add a title. Make sure the page URL is archive.
Publish this page and add the link to the navigation setting.

This page will show the yearly post archive. If you want to show post archive grouped by monthly then just add #monthly internal tag to this page.

Post styles

This theme comes with three different post styles. When you create a post, by default it shows post style one.

For post style two and post style three, open post setting panel while writing post. and select Post Style Two or Post Style Three template.

Table of content

In this theme you can show a table of content within post. To add a table of content to a post add the internal tag #toc to that post. A table of content will be show in that post.

Contact form

In the demo of this theme you have seen a contact form. As ghost has no inbuilt feature for this you have to use a third party service. In demo formspree has been used.

If you want to add contact form in your site same as the demo, then follow this steps.

There is a file named contact-form-code.txt in the downloaded zip folder.

Copy the entire code from that file, now go to your page editor and then add the code using an HTML card. Change the example email address to your own email address within the code.

Theme translation

This theme supports translation. Please follow the steps below to translate this theme in your language.

Within theme folder, there is a folder named "locales". In that folder by default you will find a file named en.json. This is the default file for English language and you have to use this file to create your own language file.
make a copy of en.json and give a name following this format [language_code].json ( example: for French fr.json for German i.e. Deutsch de.json for Russian ru.json etc. )
If you are not sure about what is you language code then you can visit this wiki page and see. Use the two letter (ISO 639-1) code.
Now open the newly created <your_language>.json file in text editor. You will see "KEY": "VALUE" format in each line.
In English language KEY and VALUE are same. Now you read the left part of the : i.e. KEY part and change the tight part i.e. VALUE part to your own language.
After finishing the translation Save the file and upload the theme to your site.
Go to your admin area, Visit "General setting" page and change the "publication Language" option. By default there is "en" for English. Add your own language code there in place of "en" and save the settings.
Visit your site, If everything goes right, you will see all the theme related text in your site is in your translated language.

Theme customization

If you need to add only small CSS or just change colors then you can add using Ghost's Code Injection feature. In "Site Header" box you can add CSS. You can override the default colors, which are available as CSS custom properties (also knows ad CSS variables). See How to change color or CSS section below.

Detail customization prerequisite

This theme is built using Gulp to compile JavaScript and CSS. CSS is written in SCSS. So if you want to modify the theme's styles or appearance or anything you want to customize, before doing that you need to setup development environment setup.

Please follow all the steps below one by one to do it.

You need to have installed node js and gulp installed in your local machine.

If you don't have NodeJS installed in your machine then visit nodejs.org and download and install latest LTS version of NodeJS.
After installing NodeJS open a command prompt or terminal. Then type node -v. If it shows a version number then NodeJS is installed correctly. Also enter this command npm -v to see npm ( comes with node js) is installed properly.
After installing node js you need to install Gulp CLI globally in your machine. So in your terminal or command prompt enter this command. npm install gulp-cli -g. It may take some time, it will install Gulp CLI globally in your machine. Now you have done the environment setup.
At this point go to the development theme folder. In downloaded zip there is a folder named "development". Within that folder you will see a folder named as the theme name. Enter in that folder and run command prompt / terminal here. Or you can navigate to this folder within already running terminal.
Now enter command npm install. It may take some time. It will install all the development dependency within the project. It may show some warning, don't worry those are OK.
At this time you are ready to modify theme, Run one more command gulp in the terminal. It will initially compile all files and star to watch file changes. Keep the terminal open and start customizing the theme.

How to change color or CSS

If you just want to change the accent color for yours site you can directly do that from the Ghost dashboard.

Go to Settings > Branding in your dashboard and then change the accent color there.
Save the settings and your selected color will be reflect in your site.

If you do not want to setup development environment and just want to change other colors. Then you can override already available CSS custom properties (also knows ad CSS variables). See the available custom properties in the below code block.

:root {
    --theme-color: var(--ghost-accent-color);
    --white: #ffffff;
    --black: #000000;
    --success-color: #96EA8C;
    --error-color: #FF9B84;
    --body-background-color: #FBF8F1;
    --text-color-main: #454959;
    --text-color-dark: #05091a;
    --text-color-light: #7e8293;
    --gray-light-color: #EFEFEF;
    --gray-lighter-color: #f9f9f9;
    --border-color: #DADCE5;
    --button-background-color: #05091a;
    --button-text-color: var(--white);
    --shadow: 0 4px 10px 2px rgba(132, 132, 133, 0.15);
}

Dark theme

[data-theme=dark] {
    --theme-color: var(--ghost-accent-color);
    --white: #ffffff;
    --black: #000000;
    --success-color: #96EA8C;
    --error-color: #FF9B84;
    --body-background-color: #1e1e28;
    --text-color-main: #d4d4d4;
    --text-color-dark: #f1f1f1;
    --text-color-light: #7f7f7f;
    --gray-light-color: #454854;
    --gray-lighter-color: #303340;
    --border-color: #2a2d3b;
    --button-background-color: #f1f1f1;
    --button-text-color: var(--black);
    --shadow: 0 10px 10px rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.2);
}

If you already setup or want to setup development environment and then want to modify the theme then read below.

In the theme folder you will find "assets > scss" folder which contains all the theme styles written in SCSS.

To change any style / css you need to modify here. In SCSS folder you will find a folder named "components" which contains a bunch of .scss files which are part of the whole theme's style. and all those files are imported in a specific order in "screen.scss" file located in "scss" folder root outside of "components" folder. please don't edit that file.

To change the Theme color please follow the steps below.

Open the _global-settings.scss file in your code editor.
Now you have to change the color hexcode (#xxxxxx) in this file and save the file.
If you have followed the above section of instruction ( Detail customization prerequisite), and already running terminal with the gulp command then the file changes will be detected and if there is no error in your file then it will be automatically compiled.

The _global-settings.scss file looks like below.

/*=====================================================
    Fonts
=====================================================*/
:root {
    --font-title: 'Libre Baskerville', serif;
    --font-body: 'Inter', sans-serif;
}
/*=====================================================
    light theme colors ( as SCSS mixin )
=====================================================*/
@mixin theme-light {
    --body-background-color: #FBF8F1;
    --text-color-main: #454959;
    --text-color-dark: #05091a;
    --text-color-light: #7e8293;
    --gray-light-color: #EFEFEF;
    --gray-lighter-color: #f9f9f9;
    --border-color: #DADCE5;
    --button-background-color: #05091a;
    --button-text-color: var(--white);
    --shadow: 0 4px 10px 2px rgba(132, 132, 133, 0.15);
}
/*=====================================================
    dark theme colors ( as SCSS mixin )
=====================================================*/
@mixin theme-dark {
    --body-background-color: #1e1e28;
    --text-color-main: #d4d4d4;
    --text-color-dark: #f1f1f1;
    --text-color-light: #7f7f7f;
    --gray-light-color: #454854;
    --gray-lighter-color: #303340;
    --border-color: #2a2d3b;
    --button-background-color: #f1f1f1;
    --button-text-color: var(--black);
    --shadow: 0 10px 10px rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.2);
}
/*=====================================================
    common variables ( as SCSS mixin ) 
    define common variable for light and dark here
=====================================================*/
@mixin common-vars {
    /* setting theme color to ghost accent color. By default we used #FF3A46 */
    --theme-color: var(--ghost-accent-color);
    --logo-header-height: 40px;
    --logo-footer-height: 40px;
    --white: #ffffff;
    --black: #000000;
    --success-color: #96EA8C;
    --error-color: #FF9B84;
    --radius-xs: 0;
    --radius-sm: 0;
    --radius-md: 0;
    --radius-lg: 0;
}
.rounded-corner {
    --radius-xs: 4px;
    --radius-sm: 8px;
    --radius-md: 16px;
    --radius-lg: 24px;
}
/*=====================================================
    ⚠ WARNING: please do not edit below this line,
    incorrect coding may break the theme

    Merging common variables with light and dark
    separately
=====================================================*/
:root {
    @include common-vars;
    @include theme-light;
}
[data-theme="dark"] {
    @include common-vars;
    @include theme-dark;
}

After modifying the theme css when you are done and want to install the final theme in your live site, do the following.

Go to running terminal ( terminal is navigated to development theme folder and running gulp command to watch the file changes )
Press Ctrl + C in your keyboard to end the running task.
After ending running task enter this command, gulp build. This command will build the production ready ( live site ready ) theme package within a folder named "build".
After doing the gulp build if you need you can configure the theme options ( such as pricing tables, social links etc ) then use this command gulp zip. It will make a folder named "dist" and make a zip of the contents of "build" folder within "dist" folder.
Now you can upload this newly created zip in your ghost admin panel.

Changelog

V 1.0.0 - October 12, 2022

Initial release

On this page

Using the theme

Light and dark mode

Logo settings

Body background color for light mode

Title and body font

Enable rounded corner

Sticky navigation

Copyright text

Intro section on home page

Featured posts on home page

Navigation links

Comments

Code highlighting

Author and tag archive

Yearly and monthly post archive

Post styles

Table of content

Contact form

Theme translation

Theme customization

Detail customization prerequisite

How to change color or CSS

Changelog

V 1.0.0 - October 12, 2022

Hansika Documentation

On this page

Using the theme

Light and dark mode

Logo settings

Body background color for light mode

Title and body font

Enable rounded corner

Sticky navigation

Copyright text

Intro section on home page

Featured posts on home page

Navigation links

Adding social links

Comments

Code highlighting

Author and tag archive

Yearly and monthly post archive

Post styles

Table of content

Contact form

Theme translation

Theme customization

Detail customization prerequisite

How to change color or CSS

Changelog

V 1.0.0 - October 12, 2022