Casper

A classic theme for Ghost, originally the default theme. These days, our default theme is Source

This is the latest development version of Casper! If you're just looking to download the latest release, head over to the releases page.

 

 

First time using a Ghost theme?

Ghost uses a simple templating language called Handlebars for its themes.

This theme has lots of code comments to help explain what's going on just by reading the code. Once you feel comfortable with how everything works, we also have full theme API documentation which explains every possible Handlebars helper and template.

The main files are:

• default.hbs - The parent template file, which includes your global header/footer
• index.hbs - The main template to generate a list of posts, usually the home page
• post.hbs - The template used to render individual posts
• page.hbs - Used for individual pages
• tag.hbs - Used for tag archives, eg. "all posts tagged with news"
• author.hbs - Used for author archives, eg. "all posts written by Jamie"

One neat trick is that you can also create custom one-off templates by adding the slug of a page to a template file. For example:

• page-about.hbs - Custom template for an /about/ page
• tag-news.hbs - Custom template for /tag/news/ archive
• author-ali.hbs - Custom template for /author/ali/ archive

Development

Casper styles are compiled using Gulp/PostCSS to polyfill future CSS spec. You'll need Node, pnpm and Gulp installed globally. After that, from the theme's root directory:

# install dependencies
pnpm install

# run development server
pnpm dev

Now you can edit /assets/css/ files, which will be compiled to /assets/built/ automatically.

The zip Gulp task packages the theme files into dist/<theme-name>.zip, which you can then upload to your site.

# create .zip file
pnpm zip

Publishing a release

Releases are shipped in two steps. First bump the version — this updates package.json and creates the matching commit and v<version> git tag:

# pick one of: patch | minor | major (or an explicit version, e.g. 5.13.0)
pnpm version minor

Then run ship, which checks the working tree is clean, pushes the commit and tag, and drafts the GitHub release from the changelog:

pnpm ship

Note

pnpm version must be run first — unlike the old yarn version, pnpm version is not interactive and pnpm ship no longer performs the bump itself.

PostCSS Features Used

• Autoprefixer - Don't worry about writing browser prefixes of any kind, it's all done automatically with support for the latest 2 major versions of every browser.
• Color Mod

SVG Icons

Casper uses inline SVG icons, included via Handlebars partials. You can find all icons inside /partials/icons. To use an icon just include the name of the relevant file, eg. To include the SVG icon in /partials/icons/rss.hbs - use {{> "icons/rss"}}.

You can add your own SVG icons in the same manner.

Translations

Please see @TryGhost/Themes/theme-translations/README.md for how to build, edit, or contribute translations.

Copyright & License

Copyright (c) 2013-2026 Ghost Foundation - Released under the MIT license.