Customise Ghost CMS

Ghost core has limited extension points when coming to adding new properties for blogs. When compared to WordPress it lacks the Custom Post types and Meta extension properties.

However, use handlebars helpers, we could customise ghost blogs with more powerful block features.

To start off with we include the handlebars template in the config.js.

Note: This file may be overwritten during Ghost updates.

config.js

    require('./hbs_helper_bl')();  
    var path = require('path'),  
        config;
    ...
    ...

hbs___helper_bl.js

    var hbs = require('express-hbs');

    module.exports = function() {  
      hbs.registerHelper('bl', function (node, post) {
        var content = post.data.root.post.html
        var regexstring = '<bl_' + node + '>[\s\S]*?</bl_' + node + '>'
        var regexp = new RegExp(regexstring, "gm");
        if(content.match(regexp)){
          var match = content.match(regexp)[0]
          match = match.replace('<bl_' + node + '>', '');
          match = match.replace('</bl_' + node + '>', '');
          return new hbs.SafeString(match)
        } else {
          return ''
        }
      });
      hbs.registerHelper('if_eq', function(a, b, opts) {
        if (a == b) {
          return opts.fn(this);
        } else {
          return opts.inverse(this);
        }
    });
    };

In your ghost editor, created different blocks of bl_ for different posts. Anything that goes inside each block is not written to your output html unless called via block helpers

    <bl_title>  
    Title goes here  
    </bl_title>  
    ___  
    <bl_slider>  
    Slider Content goes here  
    </bl_slider>  
    ___

    <bl_anything>  
    Any custom content goes here  
    </bl_anything>  

In your page/post template, say post.hbs you can selectively get the contents of each block using the below helper. Make sure you don’t use {{content}} context helper anymore from ghost.

    <h1>{{bl 'title'}}</h1>  
    <p>{{bl 'slider'}}</p>  

Checkout the custom Ghost CMS in action at Github.