Welcome to Ghost
Welcome, it's great to have you here. 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.
Ghost has a flexible organisational taxonomy called tags which can be used to configure your site structure using dynamic routing.
Ghost has a flexible organisational taxonomy called tags which can be used to configure your site structure using dynamic routing.
You can think of tags like Gmail labels. By tagging posts with one or more keyword, you can organise articles into buckets of related content.
When you create content for your publication you can assign tags to help differentiate between categories of content.
For example you may tag some content with News and other content with Podcast, which would create two distinct categories of content listed on /tag/news/
and /tag/weather/
, respectively.
If you tag a post with both News
and Weather
- 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.
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.
News, Technology, Startup
So you can add the most important tag which you want to show up in your theme, but also add related tags which are less important.
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, #video
Here, the theme would assign the post publicly displayed tags of News - 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.
You can find documentation for theme development techniques like this and many more over on Ghost's extensive theme documentation.
Dynamic routing gives you the ultimate freedom to build a custom publication to suit your needs. Routes are rules that map URL patterns to your content and templates.
For example, you may not want content tagged with News
to exist on: example.com/tag/news
. Instead, you want it to exist on example.com/news
.
In this case you can use dynamic routes to create customised collections of content on your site. It's also possible to use multiple templates in your theme to render each content type differently.
There are lots of use cases for dynamic routing with Ghost, here are a few common examples:
example.com/europe/story-title/
Dynamic routing can be configured in Ghost using YAML files. Read our dynamic routing documentation for further details.
You can further customise your site using Apps & Integrations.