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!

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Hey! Welcome to Ghost, it's great to have you :)

We know that first impressions are important, so we've populated your new site with some initial Getting Started posts that will help you get familiar with everything in no time. This is the first one!

There are a few things that you should know up-front:

1. Ghost is designed for ambitious, professional publishers who want to actively build a business around their content. That's who it works best for. If you're using Ghost for some other purpose, that's fine too - but it might not be the best choice for you.

2. The entire platform can be modified and customized to suit your needs, which is very powerful, but doing so does require some knowledge of code. Ghost is not necessarily a good platform for beginners or people who just want a simple personal blog.

3. For the best experience we recommend downloading the Ghost Desktop App for your computer, which is the best way to access your Ghost site on a desktop device.

Ghost is made by an independent non-profit organisation called the Ghost Foundation. We are 100% self funded by revenue from our Ghost(Pro) service, and every penny we make is re-invested into funding further development of free, open source technology for modern journalism.

The main thing you'll want to read about next is probably: the Ghost editor.

Once you're done reading, you can simply delete the default Ghost user from your team to remove all of these introductory posts!

Ghost uses a language called Markdown to format text.

When you go to edit a post and see special characters and colours intertwined between the words, those are Markdown shortcuts which tell Ghost what to do with the words in your document. The biggest benefit of Markdown is that you can quickly apply formatting as you type, without needing to pause.

At the bottom of the editor, you'll find a toolbar with basic formatting options to help you get started as easily as possible. You'll also notice that there's a ? icon, which contains more advanced shortcuts.

For now, though, let's run you through some of the basics. You'll want to make sure you're editing this post in order to see all the Markdown we've used.

Formatting text

The most common shortcuts are of course, bold text, italic text, and hyperlinks. These generally make up the bulk of any document. You can type the characters out, but you can also use keyboard shortcuts.

• CMD/Ctrl + B for Bold
• CMD/Ctrl + I for Italic
• CMD/Ctrl + K for a Link
• CMD/Ctrl + H for a Heading (Press multiple times for h2/h3/h4/etc)

With just a couple of extra characters here and there, you're well on your way to creating a beautifully formatted story.

Inserting images

Images in Markdown look just the same as links, except they're prefixed with an exclamation mark, like this:

![Image description](/path/to/image.jpg)

Most Markdown editors don't make you type this out, though. In Ghost you can click on the image icon in the toolbar at the bottom of the editor, or you can just click and drag an image from your desktop directly into the editor. Both will upload the image for you and generate the appropriate Markdown.

Important Note: Ghost does not currently have automatic image resizing, so it's always a good idea to make sure your images aren't gigantic files before uploading them to Ghost.

Making lists

Lists in HTML are a formatting nightmare, but in Markdown they become an absolute breeze with just a couple of characters and a bit of smart automation. For numbered lists, just write out the numbers. For bullet lists, just use * or - or +. Like this:

1. Crack the eggs over a bowl
2. Whisk them together
3. Make an omelette

or

• Remember to buy milk
• Feed the cat
• Come up with idea for next story

Adding quotes

When you want to pull out a particularly good excerpt in the middle of a piece, you can use > at the beginning of a paragraph to turn it into a Blockquote. You might've seen this formatting before in email clients.

A well placed quote guides a reader through a story, helping them to understand the most important points being made

All themes handles blockquotes slightly differently. Sometimes they'll look better kept shorter, while other times you can quote fairly hefty amounts of text and get away with it. Generally, the safest option is to use blockquotes sparingly.

Dividing things up

If you're writing a piece in parts and you just feel like you need to divide a couple of sections distinctly from each other, a horizontal rule might be just what you need. Dropping --- on a new line will create a sleek divider, anywhere you want it.

This should get you going with the vast majority of what you need to do in the editor, but if you're still curious about more advanced tips then check out the Advanced Markdown Guide - or if you'd rather learn about how Ghost taxononomies work, we've got a overview of how to use Ghost tags.

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.