Are you looking for some free Ghost themes or you just want to know more about this Tumblr alternative? You’ve come to the right place. In this article, we will focus on what is Ghost and what are some good and free examples of Ghost themes.
What is Ghost?
Ghost is a free and very popular open-source headless Node.js CMS. Unlike WordPress or Joomla, Ghost tries to specifically focus on bloggers and publishers. It is a completely independent platform that gives you control of the technology, the content, and the audience. The framework was designed with one clear purpose: minimalistic content publishing.
Apart from its headless capabilities, one of the great things about Ghost framework is its leanness. It is designed for a specific task, publishing content, and it performs that task really effectively. Is also has an elegant and friendly UI.
If you want to check out more official information about this framework, here’s the official website and the github page.
Ghost, a Tumblr alternative
If you are bored of Tumblr or you are just looking for a solution that will suit your blogging platform need, then Ghost might be a good recommendation. If you are searching on Google for alternatives, you will definitely find Ghost among them.
Indeed, Ghost is a powerful, customisable alternative to Tumblr which puts you in charge. Ghost is a faster solution than other options on the market because it runs on Node.js environment and it is affordable. It comes with post and analytics, third-party apps, developer tools, and other features. Also, this blogging platform comes with some sharing-friendly features like:
- Simple content management
- Email newsletters built-in
- SEO features included automatically
- Publish once, distribute everywhere
Free Ghost Themes Examples
If you think you should give this framework a try, then you should check these awesome Ghost themes examples. They are free and open-source! <3
1. Material Kit Ghost
Material Kit Ghost is a high quality, open-source, and free Ghost theme. It comes packed with a large number of features and its pixel-perfect design will help you create amazing web apps. The screens are carefully created and inspired by Creative Tim – Material Kit line of design.
Putting together a page has never been easier. From HTML insertion to bookmarks and responsive styling, you can easily create and build your blog posts.
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2. Massively
Massively is a very good-looking, free, and open-source theme for Ghost. It is a text-heavy, article-oriented design built around a huge background image and scroll effects powered by Scrollex.
It was originally created by @ajlkn for HTML5 UP and later ported to Ghost.
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3. London
London is a custom and image-centric theme Ghost. It is also free and open-source. The theme was made for publishers and portfolios with plenty of graphics to show off to the world.
It is fully responsive and it was released under the MIT license.
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5. Caffeine
Caffeine is a minimalist Material Design inspired theme for the Ghost publishing platform. It originally began as a fork of Uno-Zen, but has since been drastically changed. Huge thanks to the original creator for the original theme layout and inspiration.
The theme is super easy to configure, with almost no code change necessary!
Features:
- Masonry support for Pinterest-esque grid layouts
- Scroll reveal support for Google+ like rendering
- Mailchimp integration and support for email subscriptions
- Font-awesome support to use the latest icons from Font Awesome
- and many more!
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6. Fizzy
Fizzy is a very good-looking, free and open-source blogging theme for Ghost.
The philosophy behind this theme is to build something minimal without losing the taste for blogging.
Features:
- Showcase (carousel + 2 featured post)
- Internal tags (
carousel
,no index
) - Custom templates (
tag archive
,post archive
,full width
,post with TOC
) - Comment system (gitalk, DISQUS)
- and many more!
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7. Biron
Biron is a free and responsive Ghost theme with a clean and minimal design, making it ideal for personal blog or magazine. Biron is built on Bulma CSS framework using modern tools HTML5 & CSS3, gulp, SASS making the customization really easy.
Features:
- Fully responsive
- Translation support
- Subscription form support
- Custom logo support
- and many more!
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8. Newsliner
Newsliner is an open-source and free Ghost theme that puts newsletters at the center of attention for your website or blog. It is a clean and responsive design centered around a large background image with colorful overlays and a large newsletter sign-up call-to-action. It was developed as part of the Epilocal project, which aims to build affordable software tools for local news sites, but it can be used by anyone who is looking for a simple design that will maximize newsletter sign-ups. It is open-sourced under the Creative Commons license, which just means you shouldn’t remove the link to Epilocal in the footer of the theme.
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9. Editorial
Editorial is a free and open-source theme for Ghost
It has a news-oriented design built around a dynamic ‘locking’ sidebar (try the toggle to see it in action!) and it is purpose-built for content-centric sites. Originally created by @ajlkn for HTML5 UP and later ported to Ghost.
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10. The Shell
The Shell is a minimalistic dark color theme for Ghost platform.
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11. No-nonsense
No-nonsense is a fully-featured, content-focused Ghost theme. It is inspired by ghostwriter and typesome.
Features:
- Multi-author support
- Post cover image
- Tag page description
- Custom error page
- and many more!
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Final thoughts
I hope this collection of free Ghost themes is useful and it will help you when choosing a blog developing tool.
Let us know if you are using Ghost and what are your pros and cons. If you’ve already been using this CMS solution for blog/website development and you are planning to go along with it, check out this useful list of beautiful premium themes for Ghost.
Ps. Here’s a more complex solution for blog developing using Laravel technology – Material Blog Laravel.
Happy coding, fellows!