1. Introduction

Thank you! for buying one of our templates, if you find any kind of issue or bug don't hesitate on contact us.

We will resolve your problem as soon as possible.

But please check carefully the documentation, all general questions of theme usage are highly detailed on this file.

Template information:

Features

  • Ghost 5.x Compatible
  • Highly optimized for speed.
  • Minimal Design.
  • Compatible with Memberships see here..
  • Full Koenig Editor Support, check demo here..
  • Pre packaged with SASS (SCSS), Prepros config file included.
  • Syntax Highlight see here.
  • Custom Subscribe Page see here..
  • Custom Sign In Page see here..
  • Constantly updated.
  • Translation ready (English and Spanish Included).
  • Minified and Optimized code.
  • HTML5 & CSS3 ready.
  • 3 Single post dispositions:
  • Custom Tag page, see here.
  • Custom Author page, see here.
  • Custom 404 Page see here.
  • Blog Cover support.
  • Search Widget.
  • All Koening blocks supported: Callouts, Toggles, Gallery, Audio, File, etc.
  • Advertising sections.
  • Lazy Disqus Support.
  • Fully responsive.
  • Video Support (Vimeo, Youtube, etc).
  • Retina Display Ready.
  • Font Awesome icons.
  • Works on Android, Ipad and Iphone.
  • Documentation included.
  • Clean Design.
  • Well Coded.
  • Navigation Menu.

Requirements

Maktub is a Ghost theme so the basic requirements are the same of Ghost

2. Theme Setup

2.1. Install the template

This guide assumes that you already have a Ghost installation ready.

Uploading the theme

  • Log in into your Ghost admin panel.
  • Go to settings (design section) and upload "maktub.zip"
  • Click Activate.

Uploading the theme on custom hosting (FTP)

The instructions are pretty simple:

  • Login on your FTP account.
  • Unzip the maktub.zip file and copy maktub folder to your /ghost_installation/content/themes
  • Restart your installation if neccesary. You can ask help to your hosting provider if you don't know how to do this step.
  • Login into your ghost admin panel.
  • Go to settings (general) and select theme "maktub"
  • Click Save.

2.2. Activate Membership Feature

For Ghost 4.0 and higher Members feature is enabled by default.

IMPORTANT: We highly recommend you to read the Full Guide about Membership and Subscribers: https://ghost.org/help/setup-members/

2.2.1 Create Required Pages for Members

On Ghost v3.0 and higher there is a new feature where visitors can subscribe to your Blog, this feature requires to create 4 pages:

Note: the most important is to create these pages with the next unique slugs: "account", "membership", "subscribe" and "signin", the title doesn't matter:

Example of usage:

1.- A subscribe page (required): where all your visitors can register their emails. Ref: https://ghost.estudiopatagon.com/maktub/subscribe/

2.- A Sign In page (required): where all your visitors can send login link to their emails. Ref: https://ghost.estudiopatagon.com/maktub/signin/

3.- A Membership page (optional): if you are not going to publish paid articles, is totally optional. This page will display your Price Tables with free, monthly and yearly plans. In case you need to edit the tables, you must edit maktub/page-membership.hbs file. Ref: https://ghost.estudiopatagon.com/maktub/membership/

4.- An Account page (optional): if you are not going to publish paid articles, is totally optional. This page will display your customer subscription plans with some details and a cancel button if they don't want to renew their plans, here is an example:

2.2.2 How to create "Tiers" for members (Ghost 5.X)

For Ghost 5.x Price Tables are created automatically if you connect Stripe pay system, you can check the full guide here: https://ghost.org/help/setup-members/

Important note: Don't forget to create the required 4 pages detailed in step "2.2.1" from this documentation.

2.3. Basic theme usage

How to change the logo

Maktub supports text and image logo. By default text logo is used, if you want a image logo you can do the next steps:

  • Go to Settings/Design
  • Click " Brand"
  • Go to Publicacion Logo and click upload image.
  • Click Save.

Setting a post featured image

To add the featured image for every post you must follow the next steps:

  • Click new post button.
  • Hover the content area and you will see an "add feature image" button like the next screenshot.
  • Click update/ save.

Creating the navigation menu.

Note: This feature is available on ghost 0.5.9 and higher.

  • Login into your admin.
  • Go to "Settings" (cog icon) on the left side -> "Navigation".
  • You can create some links like: home, contact or gallery if you are actually using them.

On Maktub v1.5.0 we introduced compatibility for Secondary Navigation, this section will appear on footer:

This section is specifically designed to show any relevant link like "Terms" or "Policy" but of course, you can link to any content/website you want.

How to create a gallery or any Koenig block.

Maktub is compatible with the latest gallery feature from Koenig Editor.

First you must click "plus" button and select gallery:

After you select some images you will see a custom grid like this:

Finally click save and you will see you custom gallery on the post content, it is important to know every image can be clicked and displayed on a custom lightbox, so you must upload good quality images.

2.4. Plugins configuration

2.4.1 Main Theme Configurations

On Ghost 4.x and higher there is a new theme options panel, here it will located the most important options of the theme.

To access to these options you must:

  • Log In into your admin.
  • Click the "cog" icon on the left side.
  • Go to "Design"

  • Log In into your admin.
  • Click "Site wide" toggle.
  • You will see the custom options available for the theme.

2.4.2 How to Enable Native Comments

In case of using Native Comments, just go to Admin -> Settings -> Membership and enable commenting:

How to get your Disqus Shortname (in case of using Disqus comments).

Disqus comments works like any JS api. You can create your Disqus code in the next url: http://disqus.com/admin/create/

If you don't have a Disqus account just create it (it's free) then open the url: http://disqus.com/admin/create/

Now you can see something like this:

Your unique "Disqus URL" is your shortname, so copy that name and click finish registration.

In this case the Disqus Shortname will be disqus-example. Now we have our disqus shortname and we must change save into our Theme Options Panel. So follow the steps 2.4.1 and paste the disqus shortname there.

2.4.3 How to use Custom Google Fonts from (theme options)

In Maktub v1.5.0 we introduced 2 new custom settings:

  • Title Font: used on all main articles and widget titles (and some minor elements).
  • Body Font: mainly used for large texts/content. This font is present on excerpt and all "Single Post content".

You can use all fonts that are available here: https://fonts.google.com/ but it is super important to note, just use fonts that at least include font weight 400 (regular), 700 (bold) and also offers "italic" as style, as follow the next image:

IMPORTANT: the font name should match exactly the same as Google website (it is case sensitive), example:

✔️ Correct usage: "Roboto Condensed".

❌ Incorrect usage: "Roboto condensed" or "roboto condensed".

A good list of widely compatible fonts are: "Open Sans", "Roboto", "Outfit", "Poppins", "Noto Sans", "Nunito Sans", "Montserrat".

And the most Popular Fonts can be found here: https://fonts.google.com/analytics

In Maktub v1.5.0 we introduced 2 new custom settings, these settings are available on Ghost admin -> Settings -> design -> site wide.

  • Sidebar Facebook Widget
  • Sidebar Twitter Widget

To enable properly these 2 new widgets, it will be required to assign properly your Facebook and Twitter url, on: Ghost admin -> General -> Social Accounts:

2.5. Custom Post Templates

Maktub add some extra templates to extend ghost functionalities, these post templates are:

After a post is created, click right sidebar button and you will find all available templates at the bottom:

2.6 How to add custom colors to the tags and Text Articles

You can use the default featured from your Ghost panel:

  • Log In into your admin.
  • Click left size menu "Tags"
  • Create a new tag and select a custom color.

2.7. Enable search engine (API Key for custom search)

On Ghost v2.12 and later Ghost Team moved the old Beta API to the new Content API, this require some steps if you want to get it work the search engine.

  • Login into your Ghost admin and click "Cog" icon (settings/general) link.
  • Go to integrations.
  • Click on "add custom integration" button.
  • Add a name like "Search Engine".

  • Click create.
  • Copy the Content API Key.
  • Go to "Theme Options" Settings -> Design -> Side wide and use the "Search API key" field.

3. Advanced Setup (code knowledge needed)

3.1. Add widgets to the template

Edit advertising section

Maktub includes 1 strategic place to add advertising:

  • maktub/partials/widgets/advertising.hbs

It is important to replace the link "<a>" tag with your respective advertising or remove the div container if you are not going to use them.

If you are not going to use any advertising section, you can open advertising.hbs file and remove all the content from that file.

How to add widgets to the sidebar

  • Go to maktub/partials/sidebar.hbs
  • All widgets are inside a folder named "widgets"

So if you want a base to create your own widget, it is recommended to copy "text-widget.hbs" content into sidebar.hbs

3.2. How translate the theme

Maktub supports multiples languages but you need to add your own lang file for this purpose:

  • Go to Settings/General -> Publication Language
  • Click "expand" and change to your correct lang code, for example: French is "fr", Spanish is "es".
  • Click Save.

After that, you need to add an extra files inside maktub/locales/fr.json

We recommend to copy en.json file and start translating every text inside this file.

3.3. Syntax Highlighter

Maktub supports code highlighting via Prism Plugin: you can check the plugin documentation here.

If you want to highlight your code, you must always use <pre class="language-X"><code></code></pre> tags, where X can be: html, css, js, php, etc.

Highlight HTML example:

Line numbers class is optional, so if you want to show short code examples, you can use <pre class="language-html"></pre>

Important: you must escape your code (only for HTML) before paste into your Ghost markup, for example https://www.freeformatter.com/html-escape.html

4. CSS Styles

This project uses the following .css files for development:

  • assets/scss/font-awesome.min.css - font awesome icons.
  • assets/scss/jquery.magnific-popup.scss - MagnificPopup jQuery Lightbox.
  • assets/scss/tooltipster.scss - Main tooltipter assets.
  • assets/scss/prism.scss - Syntax Highlighter styles.
  • assets/scss/*.scss - Main project styles, this folder includes: reset, grids, template style and responsive media queries.

In production mode we use the next minified CSS files:

  • assets/css/plugins.min.css - all external plugins in one large file used in the template.
  • assets/css/style.min.css- Main project styles minified and optimized.

For speed purposes we are using "Critical CSS" solution instead of style.min.css, you can find the main project CSS in maktub/partials/head.bs file.

5. How to change template main color

For Ghost 4.0 and higher you can easily change main color visiting Admin -> Settings -> branding (no coding required):

How to automatically compile SCSS or change color by code

Maktub is working on SCSS, the major improvement about this, is the possibility to change main and secondary color easily.

If you want to change the main color you must follow the next steps:

1.- Unzip maktub.zip (this is the template only file) and remember where is the folder location.

2.- Install a SASS compiler, we recommend you to use Prepros 6, you can download it here.

3.- After installed you must see a window like this (just click continue trial):

3.-Click on "Add Project" on the left bottom side.

4.- Search for maktub folder (where you already unziped the project).

5.- Click on config icon -> refresh, this will load Prepros 6 Config file inside theme, so everytime you save a SCSS or JS file, it will be minified and saved into maktub/assets/dist folder.

6.- Open maktub/assets/scss/_settings.scss file and change the color that you want, example:

7.- After you save settings file, you will see a notification if there isn't any error:

8.- Zip Maktub Folder and reupload into your Ghost Installation.

IMPORTANT NOTE: if you don't see the success message, go to Prepros and navigate to "assets/scss/critical-css.scss" and click "process file". Same apply for main.scss

You can double check if all is working properly on the Logs tab.

6. Javascript Files

Plugins and libraries

Development mode

Production

  • assets/dist/scripts.min.js - all external plugins and functions in one large file used in the template.

IMPORTANT: if you are a developer and you need to ADD JS changes, we recomment you to edit functions.js and use Prepros 6 to autocompile your code changes.

7. Optimization

This section will explain the basics concepts of optimization to get the highest score on Google Page Speed test.

7.1 Image Optimization

There is a lot of recommeded tools for this purpose, if you don't want to loss image quality, just skip this section.

Highest compression tool: Toolur

Website: http://compressimage.toolur.com/

We tested several compression tools and toolur online, is one of the best if you want to get 0 errors on Google Insight.

Recommended options:

  • Compression method: C
  • Image Quality: 70%
  • Don't resize and don't enlarge images.

TinyPNG: good quality and weight balance

TinyPNG is one of the most used compressor in the web, has a very basic interface and you will lost almost 10 - 15% quality. Its is highly recommended if you want to optimize your images without loosing quality.

Website: https://tinypng.com/

FileOptimizer: desktop APP

This application has the a good balance pretty closer like TinyPNG but as a desktop app.

Website: https://sourceforge.net/projects/nikkhokkho/files/FileOptimizer/

The only one important thing, is to enable "allow lossy optimizations":

7.2. Code editing CSS/JS

If you need to edit some CSS we recommend to add your changes at line nº 31 in the file maktub/partials/head.hbs for example, in the next screenshot we changed the header background to a dark green:

If you want to minify your code, we recommend you to use CSS Minify: https://cssminifier.com/

JS Minify: https://javascript-minifier.com/

The steps are pretty similar to CSS, you just need to copy your code into assets/dist/scripts.min.js at line nº 100 and it is highly recommended to minify your code.

If you are familiarized with Javascript (developer) and you need to add extra jQuery functions, we recommend you to download Prepros 6 and load the prepos-6.config file into Prepros APP, this will help you to compile js/functions.js and minify all your code automatically.

8. Fonts used

9. Credits.

Fonts Icons

By Font Awesome

Images

Freepik:

https://www.freepik.com/

10. Support

If you have any questions, please use our profile contact form on Envato http://themeforest.net/user/estudiopatagon

In case you find any bug, issue or just having some problems with the theme, use our ticket system: https://estudiopatagon.ticksy.com/