I started this blog about 1,5 years ago and I chose Ghost as my blogging platform, the reasons why are in the post.
One of the reasons was Casper, the default theme included. Casper has great features, looks nice for the most part, is opensource on GitHub and is well-maintained for new versions/features in Ghost.
I used it as the base for my customized theme, adjusting the parts I didn't like and transformed Casper into a theme that I like for 100%. Using GitHub, I can continuously rebase my changes on top of the base Casper theme and also get all new features on my blog.
Over time, I've been asked multiple times what theme I used and if I could share. I wasn't inclined to, since it is my "personal brand" on the internet and I did spend quite some time customizing.
But a couple of weeks ago I ended up in an e-mail conversation with Jessica Deen (it's a good story on how that happened), she is helping out some schools to setup a blog and my adjustments would fit that use case better. And when she asks, you just comply 😉.
Introducing CasperWide
I set to it, and split my adjustments into two parts: a public theme called CasperWide and some personal adjustments in a private theme called CasperForYR. Some screenshots below, and you can also checkout a live version:
CasperWide is not completely the same as CasperForYR, since I wanted to keep as much of the features available while my personal theme is adjusted for single-author use.
CasperWide does include the following "improvements":
- It uses more real estate on wider screens, always found Casper to limiting
- Consistent header: all pages in the site have the same header showing the blog title and description.
- Header image is context depending: it shows the blog or tag feature image, or falls back on the blog feature image
- Consistent floating header: all pages have the same floating header experience
- Due to above changes, some adjustments were needed on the posts, tags, author and pages templates
- Compacted some white space
- Cards for posts have a more distinguished background so they stand out more against the overall background
Disclaimer
While I'll try to keep the theme updated with new changes coming from the original Casper, I will not provide any support for this adjusted version. It's created for a specific use case and distributed freely with no rights reserved.
Have fun blogging!