2.3 The Theme We’ll Be Using

Welcome back to the course in this lesson, we're gonna take a look at the theme, we'll be using for our ghost to blog and we'll also install it. So let's begin. Now before I show you the theme, I wanna make a quick mention about some of the official ghost themes that you can get. So if we go to the ghost dashboard, under settings theme, you'll see that by default we have one theme installed and that's Casper. And the theme looks something like this. Let's view the site. Oops, let's actually open this in full. So this is what the Casper theme looks like. Okay, pretty good. But as I was saying previously, in order to take this to the next level. We wanna use a custom theme and customize it ourselves. Now, inside the ghost dashboard, we can find a theme directory. With a couple of suggestions these four Edition, Alto, London, Ease are all free themes and we can preview them or install them directly. But we can also open the ghost theme marketplace, where we can find a bunch of other new themes, among which some are free like this edition. While others are paid, for example, this one costs $59. This one costs $149. So, buying themes from the official ghost theme marketplace can sometimes be pricey. A great alternative for that is envato elements which also offers under CMS templates, ghost. You can find a couple of themes there under really high quality themes. The one that we're gonna be using for this course is called a Nubia. And it looks like this. We have a nice preview here. It's a responsive theme, so it's gonna look great on all devices. So the first step is to go ahead and download the theme. I already did that. And the package contains zip with the theme files and the link to the online documentation. So let's open this. And I just wanna point out that this documentation is really cool. I mean, this is the table of contents, and it tells you exactly how to customize every aspect of the theme. How to do all the things that you would wanna do with a theme like this, like add Google Analytics, Update the Favicon, and so on and so forth. It's a very well documented theme. And I just wanted to address that really quickly. So once you get the theme downloaded, you will need to go back to your ghost dashboard. You would click Upload a theme and you can simply, Drag and drop this zip file. And let's go ahead and activate it. So now, you can see that we have two installed themes. Casper which is a default and Nubia which is the currently active theme. So that transforms our ghost blog from this to this. So, a very similar layout to the official theme, but it looks different because it's using different typefaces. Different spacing, different colours, and so on and so forth. Now, if you wanna see where these themes are installed on your system. Well you can open up the working directory that we set up previously and ghost local. And you would go to content themes and nubia is the one that we just installed. And here you can see all the theme files that we're gonna customize in the upcoming lessons. All right, so now that we installed the theme, it's time to customize it. We'll do that in the next lesson. So I'll see you there.