🏎️ Build Ghost themes more quickly with our new VS Code extension

Welcome to the inaugural edition of the Build with Ghost Newsletter 🥳

It’s for creators of all levels who are interested in making Ghost their own. We’ll keep you up to date with changes in Ghost, offer tips and tricks for building with Ghost, and highlight exciting Ghost sites in the tech space.

The official Ghost VS Code extension

Microsoft’s VS Code is an industry-standard, free code editor. Already an amazing tool for creating and editing Ghost themes, we’ve made VS Code even better at it with the release of our official Ghost extension.

Ghost - Visual Studio Marketplace

Extension for Visual Studio Code - Official Ghost extension for theme development in Visual Studio Code.

Visual Studio Marketplace

Our goal with the extension is to make theme editing and creation as easy as possible, whether you’re just starting out or already a seasoned pro. Here’s what the extension does.

A guided tour

A fantastic way to learn how to build Ghost themes is to see how others have already done it. All of Ghost’s official themes are open source and available to be downloaded, studied, and modified. Our VS Code extension will help you on this journey by providing explanations for what’s going on in a theme.

Hover over any Ghost syntax to get a quick explanation, example, and link to the docs for more information. This feature is enabled automatically for any Ghost template file you open in VS Code.

Keep focused on the code

You’ve got your theme opened in the editor. You’re making great progress on your post template. You’re in an absolute flow state. But you can’t remember how to customize the output of a post’s tags.

Rather than leaving your editor, searching on Google for the answer, and returning to your theme — you can now search and access Ghost’s official docs right from the editor. By searching “tags,” you can quickly find the syntax you’re looking for and get on with creating your theme.

To search the docs, open VS Code’s command palette and search for “Ghost” or “docs.” Choose “Search Ghost’s documentation” and enter your search term. Select what you’re looking for, and it’ll open right there in the editor.

You autocomplete me

The last feature we’ll highlight is one that both newbies and power users will appreciate: autocomplete. Start typing a Ghost helper like if or for, and the extension will autocomplete your code with the proper syntax and prompt you to choose from relevant options.

Autocomplete speeds up your development process and helps you to remember the options for more complex helpers like {{#get}}. What’s more, we also support dynamic autocompletes that use your theme’s package.json configuration to generate custom snippets for responsive images and custom settings.

There are a few other neat features left to discover, so check out the official Ghost VS Code extension to learn more and download.

What’s new

In our latest tutorial, we connect Ghost to Zapier to send welcome emails to new members. You’ll learn not only how to send automated welcome emails to kickstart an engaging onboarding experience, but also about the power of integrating with Zapier, which allows you to connect your Ghost site to almost any platform on the web.

How to send a custom welcome email with Ghost

Make your first impression count by connecting Ghost and Zapier to send new members a welcome email. It gives you the chance to thank your member for signing up and jumpstarts their onboarding experience.

TutorialsTeam Ghost

From Ghost Explore

Have you seen our new creator network, Ghost Explore? It’s a way for creators and readers alike to discover their favorite new publications. Anyone running a Ghost site can add themselves to Explore to be featured prominently on Ghost.org and throughout the wider Ghost ecosystem.

Explore — Browse publications & featured writers

Discover new publishers who are writing about Art & Culture, Business, Education, Technology and more on Ghost Explore. Submit your own Ghost site here 👉

Ghost Explore

Today, we’re featuring a site from a company that’s been in the news recently for their AI chatbot, ChatGPT. This conversational bot, which gained a million users in five days, can seemingly do anything, from debugging code to writing college essays, to diagnosing illnesses.

The company behind ChatGPT is OpenAI, and this isn’t their first hit in recent memory. They also created Dalle-2, the AI image generator.

DALL·E 2

DALL·E 2 is a new AI system that can create realistic images and art from a description in natural language.

OpenAIOpenAI

And they communicate all of this using Ghost! To learn more about Dalle-2 or ChatGPT and to see how OpenAI uses Ghost to share their research with the world, check out their site:

OpenAI Blog

OpenAI is an AI research and deployment company. Our mission is to ensure that artificial general intelligence benefits all of humanity.

OpenAIOpenAI

Thanks for building with us!

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