Quill

Welcome to the Quill guide. Follow the steps in order for a new site, or jump to the section you need from the menu.

Installing Quill

Quill is installed from your Ghost dashboard in a couple of minutes.

Download quill.zip from the link in your receipt email or from the Download page.
In Ghost Admin, open Settings → Design & branding.
Choose Change theme, then Upload theme.
Select the ZIP file. Keep it zipped; Ghost unpacks it for you.
Press Activate. Your site now uses Quill.

New to Ghost? The official Ghost Help Center is a great place to learn the basics before you dive in.

Routes

Quill runs on Ghost’s standard routing, so you don’t need a custom routes.yaml. These URLs work as soon as the theme is active:

Home: /
Posts and pages: /{slug}/
Tag archives: /tag/{slug}/
Author archives: /author/{slug}/

Want a custom structure? Upload your own file in Settings → Labs → Routes.

Menus

Quill uses both of Ghost’s navigation menus, each for a different job.

Links added under Settings → Navigation → Primary appear in the header, in the order you list them. Use short labels such as Culture or About.

The secondary menu builds your footer. Start a label with a column name in square brackets and Quill groups those links together:

[Magazine] About → /about/
[Magazine] Masthead → /masthead/
[Help] Contact → /contact/

This creates two columns, Magazine and Help. Links without brackets show up as single links in the footer.

Brand and design

Everything below lives in Settings → Design & branding.

Accent colour

Your accent colour tints links, buttons and highlights. Quill lets you choose one shade for light mode and another for dark mode, so it stays readable in both.

Logo

Without a logo, Quill shows your publication name as a wordmark. Upload a logo to replace it, plus an optional light version for dark mode. An SVG or transparent PNG around 120px tall works best.

Site icon

Upload a square image of at least 512 × 512px. Ghost creates every favicon size browsers need.

Fonts

Quill pairs a refined display face for headlines with a clean sans for body text. Fonts load automatically and need no setup.

Homepage

Cover story

Star a post as Featured in the editor and it becomes the lead at the top of the homepage, with a large headline and a wide image.

Latest posts

Recent posts follow in a tidy grid with tag, date and reading time. Members-only posts show a small lock so readers know what’s behind it.

Topic sections

Each primary tag gets its own row on the homepage. Set a tag’s accent colour in Ghost Admin to give every section its own look.

Posts

Posts use a wide, comfortable reading column. Every editor card is styled, including galleries, bookmarks, callouts, toggles and embeds.

Byline and reading time

Turn author, date and reading time on or off in the theme settings. Reading time is calculated from the post length.

Members and comments

Quill works with Ghost memberships out of the box. Signup, sign-in and account screens come from Portal, which you can configure in Settings → Membership.

To open the conversation, enable Comments in the same place and choose whether all members or only paid members can comment.

Editing, translating and updating

Editing the code

Download the active theme from Change theme → Installed.
Unzip it. Styles and scripts live in assets/, templates are .hbs files.
Zip the folder again and upload it as a new theme.

Changes to the theme code are not covered by support, so keep a copy of the original.

Translating

Set your site language in Settings → General. To add a language, copy locales/en.json, rename it (for example fr.json) and translate each value.

Updating

When a new version ships, we email you a fresh link. Upload the new ZIP the same way you installed it. Your settings, colours and menus stay as they are.

Changelog

1.0.3 — current — Latest refinements and Ghost compatibility updates.
1.0.0 — first release — The first public version of Quill.

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