Fixes, Refinements, and Lessons Learned in Ghost Theme Development

A week ago, I rolled out the first round of theme changes on my Ghost blog. That work set the foundation – adjusting layouts, navigation, and a few custom touches that made the site feel more my own.

Today marks the next step in the process: refining details, fixing quirks, and smoothing out rough edges to deliver an even better reading experience. I’m not a theme developer or programmer. My skillset is communication, not code. What I do have is curiosity, a willingness to experiment, and an acceptance that sometimes the only way forward is to take a leap in the dark.

That’s where ChatGPT-5 came in – acting as a kind of coder and knowledge wizard. It explained Ghost’s quirks, walked me through Ghost's Handlebars templates, generated CSS tweaks, and helped me create a repeatable workflow.

Without that, most of these changes would never have made it past the idea stage.

As my story here goes a bit technical, here's the TL;DR if you prefer it:

What We Fixed and Improved

The journey wasn’t always smooth. There were stops and starts, discoveries and dead-ends. But each step built momentum, and each fix made the custom theme more reliable and consistent. Some highlights:

• Navigation refinements – expanding the primary navigation to allow five items before triggering the “More” dropdown, working around a limitation in the original Neon theme I built on.
• Blogroll – added to the footer, editable directly in Ghost Admin via secondary navigation. A simple idea, but it took some CSS wizardry to get the formatting and link behaviour just right.
• Footer and sidebar consistency – aligned widget titles (“Latest Posts,” “Featured Posts”), and made link styles consistent across sections.
• Membership links – fixing Ghost’s tendency to throw 404s for “Sign in” by connecting directly to Portal views instead.
• Quirks discovered – like Ghost’s habit of tying theme names to activation, which meant I needed a versioning strategy to avoid conflicts.

Versioning and Workflow

All of this sits on top of a simple versioning strategy: today’s updates are released as theme version 3.1.0. That numbering matters – it gives me a way to track what’s live, what’s local, and what’s in development.

The workflow now looks like this:

• Local development in D:\Ghost-Local
• Iteration, testing, and fixing quirks in the local environment: Ghost locally installed on a Windows 11 PC, Docker Desktop to manage the system, and VS Code for editing and managing all theme files
• Packaging the theme as a versioned zip file
• Uploading it to the live site with confidence it won’t break anything (and being prepared to revert to the now-previous theme version in case)

It’s not the workflow of a professional developer, but it’s one that works for me.

The Outcome

The result is a site that’s more consistent, more reliable, and a little more polished for readers. And equally important, a process that’s clearer and repeatable for me.

For a communicator with no coding background, that feels like a pretty good outcome.

If you’ve tried making your own Ghost theme tweaks, I’d love to hear how you handled versioning and workflow.

Related Reading:

• Refreshing the Reader Experience (14 September 2025)