gatsby-ghost-balsa-starter

A Gatsby starter for creating blogs from headless Ghost CMS.

Turn your Ghost blog into a lightning fast static website. This Gatsby theme is a front-end replacement of the Ghost Handlebars engine featuring the Balsa skin and functionality. All content is sourced from a headless Ghost CMS.

This starter is being used at Draftbox. Get lightning fast, secure front-end for your WordPress or Ghost blog, in 5 minutes or less, without coding. For our fellow devs, we also provide code export feature.

Demo

Play with the Demo to get a first impression.

Features

• Balsa Skin from Draftbox
• SEO optimized
• Fully responsive
• Gatsby images
• Styled 404 page
• RSS Feed
• AMP Pages
• Sitemap
• Contact Form
• Subscribe Form
• Social Sharing
• Google Analytics Integration
• Segment Integration
• Disqus Integration
• Composable and extensible

Getting Started

1. Install this starter by running

   gatsby new try-ghost https://github.com/draftbox-co/gatsby-ghost-balsa-starter

2. Change directory

   cd try-ghost

3. Run

   gatsby develop

   and visit your site at http://localhost:8000.

🧐 What's inside?

A quick look at the top-level files and directories you'll see in a Gatsby project.

.
├── node_modules
├── static
├── .gitignore
├── gatsby-config.js
├── yarn.lock
├── package.json
└── README.md

1. /node_modules: This directory contains all of the modules of code that your project depends on (npm packages) are automatically installed.

2. /static: This directory will contain all of the static files required by theme such as favicon, logo and robot.txt.

3. .gitignore: This file tells git which files it should not track / not maintain a version history for.

4. gatsby-config.js: This is the main configuration file for a Gatsby site. This is where you can specify information about your site (metadata) like the site title and description, which Gatsby plugins you’d like to include, etc. (Check out the config docs for more detail).

5. yarn.lock (See yarn.lock below, first). This is an automatically generated file based on the exact versions of your npm dependencies that were installed for your project. (You won’t change this file directly).

6. package.json: A manifest file for Node.js projects, which includes things like metadata (the project’s name, author, etc). This manifest is how npm knows which packages to install for your project.

7. README.md: A text file containing useful reference information about your project.

Configure

    //siteConfig.js
    module.exports = {
        siteUrl: `https://your-blog.com`, // Do not include a trailing slash!
    
        postsPerPage: 12, //for future use
    
        siteTitleMeta: `Gatsby Starter Ghost CMS`, // This allows an alternative site title for meta data for pages.
        siteDescriptionMeta: `Gastby Starter with Ghost CMS and Casper Skin`, // This allows an site description for meta data for pages.
    
        shareImageWidth: 1000, // Change to the width of your default share image
        shareImageHeight: 523, // Change to the height of your default share image
    
        shortTitle: `Ghost`, // Used for App manifest e.g. Mobile Home Screen
        siteIcon: `favicon.png`, // Logo in /static dir used for SEO, RSS, and App manifest
        backgroundColor: `#e9e9e9`, // Used for Offline Manifest
        themeColor: `#15171A`, // Used for Offline Manifest
    }

In the configuration shown above, the most important fields to be changed are siteUrl, siteTitleMeta and siteDescriptionMeta. Update at least those to fit your needs.

Ghost Content API keys

All content is sourced from a Ghost CMS. If you don't customize the file .ghost.json content is fetched from the demo location at https://cms.gotsby.org. Surely you want to source your own content. Change the keys to match your own Ghost CMS Content API keys:

    {
        "development": {
            "apiUrl": "http://localhost:2368",
            "contentApiKey": "9fccdb0e4ea5b572e2e5b92942"
        },
        "production": {
            "apiUrl": "http://localhost:2368",
            "contentApiKey": "9fccdb0e4ea5b572e2e5b92942"
        }
    }

Deploy

    gatsby build

After completion of the build process your static site can be found in the public/ folder. Copy those files over to your webserver.

Optimizing

You can disable the default Ghost Handlebars theme front-end by enabling the Make this site private flag within your Ghost settings. This enables password protection in front of the Ghost install and sets <meta name="robots" content="noindex" /> so your Gatsby front-end becomes the source of truth for SEO.

Authors

• Arun Priyadarshi (@Gunnerforlife) – Draftbox
• Keyur Raval (@thandaanda) – Draftbox
• Shyam Lohar (@shyamlohar) – Draftbox
• Tanmay Desai (@tanmaydesai89) – Draftbox

Contributions

PRs are welcome! Consider contributing to this project if you are missing feature that is also useful for others.

Copyright & License

Copyright (c) 2020 Draftbox - Released under the MIT license.